turning 40 in Korea

Today I turned 40.  Or do I turn 40 tomorrow?  I'm thinking of milking the international time flop and celebrating my birthday on Korean time and Pacific Standard time.

I started off my day walking down to the park with Lilly and Elise.  They are thrilled to be so close to so many parks again.  After breakfast, I headed to a "mok yok tang" or bath house, which I have been bribing myself with for the last couple of weeks.  (You can do this, Sarah.  Just 2 more weeks and you will be moved and going to a bathhouse!)  It worked.  I made it.  And I got to go to a bathhouse on my birthday.  Bathhouses are a little more rustic than Jjimjilbangs in that I think they're a more regular part of peoples' day.  This particular one was a 5 minute walk from our apartment and it was full of women of all sorts of ages and body types.  It wasn't quite as clear cut as the jjimjilbang in ways of signage so I may have stepped in a pool that wasn't a pool and dipped my washcloth in a place that it wasn't supposed to be dipped in.  The nice ajumas (older married women) there set me straight and gave me a lot of opportunities to practice Korean.  There was actually quite a bit of Korean practice going on there and despite it being a little bit of a scary experience, my goal is to go back weekly.  It is such a quintessential Korean experience where you are participating in their culture head first.  Love it.  And the feeling you get when you pour ice cold water on yourself after sitting in the hot tub is rejuvenating.

What else did we do today?  We went to the Seomun Sijang (market) with Collin and Rachel, introduced them to Artbox (a shop with all things adorable and Korean), shopped our favorite bookstore and ate some tasty "subway chicken".  Subway chicken actually has a more complicated and hard to remember name, but it is sold in the subway so, of course, we have dubbed it subway chicken.  It was hot and humid with a typhoon headed our way so we were sweating like crazy and praising the rain when it finally arrived. The whole day was great but at the end, all of the family pulled together a birthday dinner since Rachel's a big mouth.  We went to our Aunt's Korean bbq joint and stuffed ourselves with all of the fam.  It really did feel so good to be back with all of these people who I came to love so much on our last visit.   They got me a beautiful cake made out of little rice cakes and we left the dinner with plans for Lilly and Elise to do Taekwondo with their friend, Yeju, and for me to tutor Yeju in English.  So, all in all, a wonderful way to turn 40.  My favorite way to spend my birthday is always with my family and today I was surrounded by them.