Birthday celebrations and Kimbap Heaven

(The mini Asian garden Shayne bought me for my birthday. The big one's called a money tree.)

This post is going to be a bit hodge-podge. A little more like an actual journal entry than a themed post. But I have lots to say.

As birthdays go, this past one was pretty good.

Not only did I get spoiled for a day by Shayne the day before, but on my actual birthday I was thrown a little party at work by my boss, Mrs. An.

She ordered Korean-style Chinese food, as apparently it's tradition to eat noodles on your birthday (I couldn't figure out if you can eat any noodles, or just noodles from a Chinese restaurant...both options seem equally strange and therefore appropriate).

(The delivery guy delivering our lunch...on real plates! ...They trust people to bring them back in Korea.)

The Chinese food we had for lunch at the school was definitely better than we had anticipated. You see, about a week or so ago we tried a Chinese restaurant by our apartment. We ordered some dishes recommended by our co-workers, and instead of a sumptuous feast, we got spaghetti slathered in a bland black bean sauce and sweet and sour pork (we were expecting something like chow mein and wonton soup, so you can imagine our surprise...and horror). Anyways, we have no longer sworn off Korean Chinese food as the stuff we had at the school was much better. Shayne got some fried rice, and I had a rice and vermicelli dish (satisfying the noodle requirement).

(Shayne ready at the trough, while Mrs. An in the background gets ready to pay.)

After lunch, they brought out a cake. Luckily for them, all cakes in Korea come with birthday candles and matches. Unfortunately, however, none of them come with 27 candles. sigh.

(Me with three of the Korean teachers and Mrs. An in front of the cake....which, although the star of the show, has been mostly cut out of this picture.)

After blowing out the candles, I cut the cake and then (as any normal person would do with no plates or forks around) I started to pick up a piece to eat. As laughter erupted I looked up to see that everyone else (except me and Shayne) had chopsticks at the ready. And I must say that even though it seemed like the most ridiculous idea in the world at the time, after trying it I think that cake is probably best eaten with chopsticks. It's easy to cut, pick up, and you can massive pieces into your mouth with ease.

(Diving into the cake like children...the cake was covered in fruit, including a cherry tomato)

Anyways, that was Tuesday.

Wednesday our telephone and internet were down due to the heavy rains. And we stayed in and watched tv for much the same reason.

Today, however, we were a little more adventurous. Probably too adventurous. A small restaurant called Kimbap Heaven had been highly recommended to us by other foreigners, so we decided to check it out. Even though I'm not big on kimbap, we were assured that they had many different dishes, and more importantly, an English menu.

After perusing the selection, we decided on "bean curd fried noodle," "steamed dumplings," "assorted fried rice," and "assorted kimbap." It seemed like a decent meal from the names of the dishes, but we were never more mistaken.

(Our meal, minus the dumplings)

When our meal came we found out what the words on the menu really meant. Bean curd fried noodle means fried tofu bits with udon noodles in a peppery soup. It tasted like pepper with pepper-flavoured noodles and pepper-flavoured tofu. Not great. The "assorted" in the fried rice meant strange bits of seafood (the miniature octupus legs were the most intriguing), a fried egg, and shredded seaweed. The "assorted" in the kimbap meant spam, processed cheese, and about half a jar of mayonaise. No, I did not make that up. The dumplings, however, were quite tasty.

(Shayne holding two of the many and assorted side dishes that come with every meal. On the left is kimchi and on the right is what we discovered is spam circles on some sort of tofu thingy...repulsive)

(Take a close look at the kimbap and you can see the spam and processed cheese...whoever had the idea that this was kimbap heaven evidently had been brought up on 7-11 fare and nothing else.)

In the end we managed to get down about half of the meal (less so of the rice once we discovered the little tentacle thingies). But, as the whole thing only cost us about $10, we weren't too disappointed to chalk it all up to experience. I must say, though, that we are beginning to discover the limitations to Korean food. Thank God for Cheerios.

Jo