My Birthday

I've had a lot of bad luck on my birthday in previous years. My first year in college, I started dating someone ON my birthday, and then it quickly went downhill and ended horribly a month or two later.

The next birthday, I was dating someone else and got into a giant fight with him, in an Indian restaurant, in front of all of our friends (and some of their parents), and we broke up that night.

The next year, I was in Sweden. I went to this birthday party that I thought was a double birthday party for me and an Indian girl that all of my friends knew. When I got there, I found out the birthday party was ONLY for the Indian girl, and not for me, and she got presents and a card signed by everyone, and I didn't get anything. (Well Emily did get me a Daim Torta (a kind of ice cream cake thing) and Erica made me a card, but including that in this story ruins the drama.)

Last year, it started to get a lot better. I was dating yet ANOTHER person, and he threw me a giant birthday party with all of my friends. It was super great, and I made a giant smoky cheese ball and stuck googly eyes on pumpkins and acorn squash. And then we played werewolf. Does it get better than that?

This year, I had ANOTHER good birthday. Two in a row!

My birthday was on a Monday this year. I went to work and no one said happy birthday to me, so I thought maybe they forgot or didn't notice. I started reading Harry Potter in my office on my break, but then someone turned the lights off and I thought it was one of the children messing around. I turned around and... all of my coworkers were there with a cake with birthday candles on it, singing me happy birthday! I was completely shocked and almost started crying. It was so nice of them. I couldn't believe it. Then they shot some party poppers at me and gave me a bag of oranges. I was speechless. Korean people are great.

Here is the picture of the cake that they got me. It was some sort of pound cake / yellow cake type of thing with whipped cream and fruit on it. It was yummy yummy.


Then, two days after my birthday, my Korean monk friend had me over to his temple for lunch. He made me seaweed soup, which is a traditional Korean thing to eat on your birthday. I've heard the reason for this is that Korean mothers eat seaweed soup when they are pregnant. I'm pretty sure my mother ate raisin bran and bagels when she was pregnant with me, but I still really like seaweed soup.

Then on that weekend, 5 days after my birthday, my monk friend had me over AGAIN to have dinner for my birthday. The women at his temple made a giant dinner, and one of them got me ANOTHER cake. Here's a picture of all them at dinner. Sunim is wearing a hat that I recently knit for him.


We had rice, japchae, clam soup, squid, shrimp, radish kimchi, lettuce to wrap things in, and pineapple. And cake!


The woman who is putting the candles in is the one who bought me the cake. She is really wonderful and nice and takes care of my when I need help. She bought me a mosquito net when the mosquitos in my apartment were attacking me every night. If only I knew enough Korean to have a conversation with her!

The woman lighting the matches is one of Sunim's relatives and she is almost ALWAYS at the temple. She is really great and takes care of me, too. I can't remember how many times she has made dinner for me and everyone else. And I don't know enough Korean to have a conversation with her either!

Anyway, about the cake.


It was very unusual. It was a SWEET POTATO cake. Unlike the giant orange sweet potatoes we eat in America, Koreans prefer smaller, yellow ones. You can see some slices of them decorating the top of the cake. Again, the main part was a kind of pound cake or yellow cake, and on top was something like whipped cream. But see that layer of filling toward the bottom? That's creamy, mashed sweet potatoes. Isn't that weird?! It was good though. It took some getting used to, but then I was back to my usual cake inhaling self. I took a huge piece of it home and couldn't even wait until the next day to start eating it. I'm a fatty.

To the Koreans though, it wasn't weird at all. They are like, of course it's a sweet potato cake, silly! What else would it be?!

And then they started eating it with chopsticks! That was too much for me to handle, so I dug into mine with my soup spoon. I got of picture of them in action though. They can even cut things with those chop sticks!


And here's a picture of me in my birthday hat for fun.


So that's how my birthday was. It was great and I was really touched at the kindness of the people around me. I was lucky to have such a nice week!