Architecture Student turned Foreign-English Teacher: Birthday Weekend!

Happy Birthday! Amanda turned 23 on Friday, December 3. We spent the weekend celebrating with fun times :) Friday morning I surprised Amanda with a small chocolate cake with frosting AND candles, and also some chocolates (Belgian chocolates to be precise). Our friend Kang stopped by just before work Friday and gave Amanda a very thoughtful card and beautiful silver pocket mirror with mother of pearl inlaid on the front. It was a very nice gift. After work we were taken out to dinner by our director Glen along with her husband Luke, and were accompanied by Luke's sister and husband-in-law, Julie and Mr. Lee. We had heard about a meal called Shabu-Shabu from our friends Becky and Nick (living over in Mokpo, South Korea) and after asking Glen what it was we had decided to have it for Amanda's birthday. It turned out to be delicious! Shabu-Shabu is thinly-sliced beef, very salty goodness, that's cooked for just a few seconds in a boiling pot of vegetables. You pull the meat out along with the vegetables and eat it all together after dipping it in some wasabi sauce. We also had some octopus as a kind of appetizer that had been cooked for us.

At dinner Glen and Luke gave Amanda a cat-mug, because she always meows. Julie and Mr. Lee gave Amanda a "muffler," what we first thought was a small red blanket, we learned was actually a very wide and long scarf-like-thing, apparently called a muffler. Following our delicious dinner Glen and Luke decorated a small cake with some candles while we all sang Happy Birthday to Amanda. Something that was a little different, though, was that Amanda was suppose to sing, too, which our American followers will know that normally the birthday girl just sits and smiles :)

Finally, after dinner the six of us went to a karaoke bar! It was not like your typical American bar with a stage and some drunk guy screaming at you. It was like walking into a disco-office filled with small rooms, each decked out with flat screen TV, a big couch, a couple microphones and about 600,000 lights of various colors. It's designed so just you and your friends can go hang out and sing songs in your own private room. It was a lot of fun and entertaining seeing Glen, Luke, Mr. Lee, Julie and Amanda sing and dance.

So that was Friday. Saturday we laid-low and just went Caffe Bean for a while and enjoyed some coffee while internet surfing and reading, and then went out to dinner, just the two of us that evening. To cap the weekend off we were invited to join Kang and his wife and 5-month old son to go to Busan to go shopping and check out Haeundae beach again. We first went to Lotte Outlet Mall, a very large, new outdoor outlet shopping complex, and then to Shinsegae Mall, which has apparently landed itself a spot in the Guinness World Records for it's enormousness. Check out the photos of the Birthday Weekend below, and read about the weekend firsthand from the birthday girl's blog!