My birthday....
Was amazing! The entire day was really wonderful. At work they got cake and a present for me! The present was a beautiful Korean tea set thing -- very unique. The cake was also ... unique. Nothing beats sweet potato on pizza apparently here. Sweet potato ice cream is likewise a favorite. I was utterly shocked though, at the Sweet potato cake that everyone enjoyed in the office! They actually cook the sweet potatoes and make a mush that they put as a layer of the cake. It wasn't that bad. Ryan was unfortunately on another anti vegetable binge in hopes of catching scurvy and therefore did not partake in the potato fun. (they have a lot of potato fun in Korea).
On the Friday night we had real cake (delicious) and also crab. Now I had mentioned that us cooking crab would be a neat thing to do together for my birthday and there happen to be an abundance of live crabs in the supermarket. What I didn't know, unfortunately is that the arch nemesis of Ryan, from the aquarium we went to, were also at the grocery store. I'm at work and Ryan has gone off to pick out a crab. He comes back and mentions that we do not have a pot large enough to hold the crab that he has gotten so it will be cooked at the grocery store. I become suspicious. We have rather large pots you see. Unusual, but perhaps crabs have longer legs than I am imagining. I get home and find a ferocious looking gigantic crab that Ryan is gleefully attempting to hack the limbs off. The giant crabs differ from normal crabs in several ways but the most important of these is the spikes that they have protruding from their exoskeleton. Think of a giant rose stem you initially hack off and then break open to eat. I think it was the best birthday present ever to have Ryan assert his 'provider' role while wrestling with a giant dead spiky thing. It was hilarious!
The following day we went to Seoul (that's right, it was a two day affair!) where I got a birthday present of boots and did Christmas shopping.
Well that's about it!
EDIT: photo server's back up. Here are the pictures:
First off, the crab itself:
Secondly, the epic battle:
