Birthday & Beef

Story #1: My Birthday Adventures

My birthday this year (January 2nd!) was spent in a freezing cold airport in northern China--waiting for a flight to Seoul--for most of its entirety. It was an exhausting day but, thankfully, I have some dear friends who surprised me with a birthday cake while we were sitting in a Chinese KFC in Dalian, China (a city that turned out to be surprisingly huge, considering I had never even heard of it before... but I suppose it is China).

The cake and surprise were great but, needless to say, my 22nd birthday (ahem!) won't go down in history as my best birthday ever. My most unusual birthday? Perhaps.

Ken, however, redeemed the last birthday of my twenties this past Friday evening. He very kindly called together a group of ten people to have a little belated-birthday party for me, in all of my mopey, nobody-loves-me glory. (I'm a master at feeling sorry for myself!) It started out at my favorite Thai restaurant in Korea for some yummy green curry and ended in my favorite noraebang in Haeundae (my favorite because it comes complete with a view of Haeundae beach, allowing us to serenade the unaware-people going for a stroll along the shoreline). It was the perfect little birthday outing and I wouldn't have wanted to celebrate it any other way! And without further ado, here are some photos of the evening's highlights:

Here is Mel at the Thai restaurant, trying to take apart her "shrimp" plate that she had ordered (she had no idea it would look like this):

Does anyone else find this entree a little terrifying? Kudos to Mel for eating the whole thing (except the legs and eyeballs)!

Now, from here on out, the photos are about to get blurry and grainy. The reason for this being that, once again, we only took video and forgot to take actual pictures that night. Since I've found uploading videos on this blog to be next to impossible, I decided to take a few still-shots from the birthday videos. As I've mentioned before, I'm either really bad at doing this, or getting a clear shot from Ken's video camera is simply impossible (I have a feeling it's probably the former, though). Here we go....

Here are the ladies singing "Mama Mia" at the noraebang:

If we're looking a little too serious about this business, it's because most of us only really knew the chorus of the song.

Here are some of the boys singing "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" (a song they take very seriously, as indicated by Ken's delicate grip on the microphone and Kevin's emphatic hand-motions):

Here's my birthday cheese cake, courtesy of Costco, complete with ten candles (very gracious, considering I'm practically old enough to be a 10-year-old's mother--eek!):

An evil-looking picture, no doubt! Here's the only other still-image I could grab of the cake-event, taken while Mel and Gino sang the Korean-version of the "Happy Birthday Song":

Hello, crazy eyes!

And, last but not least, a picture of our impromptu dance party that took place while Ken bellowed out the notes to "The Twist":

Just a teeny bit embarrassing, I'd say! But a whole lot of fun, nevertheless.

And now moving on to our 2nd story: The Bulgogi Adventure

For my birthday, Mel and Gino generously gave me a gift certificate to a new, fancy bulgogi restaurant in Haeundae. Now, bulgogi is a Korean food I like because--hey!--you can't go too wrong with beef, right? Unless, of course, it's raw. Well, last night Ken and I decided to take advantage of my birthday gift, so we meandered on over to Bulgogi Brothers (the name of said restaurant) for an early dinner (which also happened to be the first meal of our pathetically lazy day). After arriving at the restaurant and being seated in a cozy booth in our own little corner, we were surprised to find the entire menu was in Korean! (Duh, we live in Korea, but usually popular restaurants include an English menu around here, so we were ignorantly surprised, nevertheless.) We can both read Korean, but we understand very little, so we decided it would be a safe option to simply order the standard "couple set" and see where that would take us. Guess what? It took us to an enormous tray of raw beef! Some of the beef was meant to be cooked on the grill in front of us, but a fairly large portion of it was not meant to be cooked at all. That's right: We accidentally ordered beef that was meant to be eaten in its raw form! Eww. Now, if I hadn't known the meat was supposed to be eaten like this, I would have given the restaurant some points for presentation:

...but it was meant to be eaten like this, so they lost some points (even though it was our own fault for not learning enough Korean to understand the menu).

Anyway, to make a long story short, we both ignored our gag-reflexes and tried to pretend like eating a raw, freshly-killed-cow was great. Ken ate his entire share of it and I put a large dent in mine (I was quite proud of myself). Truthfully? It didn't taste too bad. It tasted like... beef that happened to be raw. The texture, on the other hand, was a bit repulsive. I was proud of myself for eating as much as I did because I'm extremely sensitive to texture, which makes me a bad candidate for mushroom-eating of any kind. Raw meat? I would rather eat my toenails, thank you very much. But I did it! And here's what I looked like while doing it:

The look of terror on my face isn't even remotely fake. Coincidentally, the sign in the background resembles the exact thought in my head at that very moment.

And here's Ken, not handling it much better than I did:

To be fair to Bulgogi Brothers, the rest of the meat was pretty good (the cooked meat). It was definitely high-quality meat (or maybe I'm just assuming it was, since it was pretty pricey). Here's a not-so-flattering photo of some of our other entrees:

And there you have it. Our bulgogi adventure. To top it all off, it gave us both diarrhea just a few short hours after eating it. Of course, it may have been more psychologically-induced than raw-beef-induced. Regardless, my new New Year's resolution? Become a vegetarian!