Anyway, so my birthday was actually about 10 days ago, as most of you were apparently aware (thanks for the good words, by the way!), but this is the post about what happened around here for the "occasion".
For starters, let me try to explain the screwed up way that Koreans count your age. Despite the fact that my "international" age is now 24, here in Korea, I'm actually 26. This is quite complicated, and I'm not even really sure that I understand it fully, so if you don't quite get it, don't worry about it. The thing is that traditionally, Koreans only concerned themselves with their birth year, forgetting about the month completely, so basically when the new year (according to the lunar calendar, which the also traditionally use) rolls around, everyone becomes one year older, regardless of how long they've actually been alive at this point. The fact now, however, is that birthdays *do* matter, as in the specific day, so you also really ought to get one year older on that day as well, and you do. Additionally, there's a combination of counting the time spent in the womb as part of your age, and giving your age as in "I'm in my ___th year" rather than "I've been alive for ___ years." So basically, if I had lived my whole life in Korea, I would likely be something like 417 years old right now, and it'd be awesome.
However, being as I've only been here for a few months now, I only actually gained two years, cause I was born in November, so when I was born, I was one, and then two months later, on the lunar new year, I turned two, but then I guess we now still count by my birthday, so I don't have to wait until the next lunar new year to turn 26, or maybe I do, but either way I'm at least one year older here than I would be in Canada, so it turns out I'm *WAY* further in the future than the mere 14 hours that I thought I was.
Suckers.
Anyway, so for my birthday, which fell on a Thursday, we had a little party in the teacher's office at school, where all the other teachers present sung happy birthday to me, and I got cake (which we all shared obviously) and a little wooden wall hanging thing:
I also got a couple Korean flags, one a bit bigger than the other. I'm not sure what we'll do with the second one, but the bigger one's currently up on the wall in the second room:
Notice the four trigrams aren't the same, as I had always thought they were, never having had the opportunity or reason to closely examine the Korean flag. The three unbroken lines in the top left (top right in this orientation) represents Heaven, and the three broken lines in the bottom right (bottom left here). In the top right (bottom right here) the two broken lines separated by an unbroken line represents water, and the two unbroken lines separated by the broken one in the bottom left (top left here) represents fire. Neat huh? Go impress your friends.
A neat little thing that I got from another staff member (one of the Korean middle-school English teachers) was this little keychain, which is actually kinda cute:
Think she's calling me fat?
Don't answer that.
The last staff-related birthday thing we did was the dinner that the elementary school teachers (minus 2) went out for. In Korea, the person whose birthday it is pays for everyone else, which is kinda neat, and thanks to the cheap food in Korea, not that expensive. I think for 8 of us to eat and have pop the total came to about 75,000. That was on Wednesday of this past week.
Anyway, the best bits of the birthday were at home. Becca had gotten a cake for us:
which was delicious in every way. In our time here we've learned how to eat cake with chopsticks, which took a bit of work, let me tell you.
The cake was all well and good, but the absolute best part was the thing she got me for a present. And here it is:
It's called an
Ess-Board and it's freakin' rad. It's like a next-gen skateboard. The main difference, apart from the looks and the noticeably missing 3rd and 4th wheels, is that with this, you don't need to push off the ground to keep it moving. You don't even really need to do it to start it moving, but it's easier if you do. The middle of it rotates, so as you're going down the street, you just kinda carve like you would on a snowboard and that pushed you along. It's really quite neat, and it actually feels a lot like snowboarding. I'm getting the hang of it quite well, and am almost able to actually take it places that I'm going apart from the corner store at the end of the street, which I can get to no problem. It's awesome cause it's also small enough that I'll be able to ship it home without too much trouble when we're done here, which is helpful.
All in all -- super-rad birthday. The other (incredibly amazing) bit to it was the trip we took to Pusan last weekend, which we will post details/pictures of when it's not shortly after 3am.
G'night.