My Birthday! Plus A Cooking Class

Holidays away from your family can be hard. Especially the first one away from your family after moving to another country 13 hours ahead. My birthday was hard this year. It was the first one that I didn't celebrate with my parents and the first one where I wasn't around any of my family or close friends around. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't totally alone. I did get to spend the birthday with 80 other fulbrighters, and as nice as that was, it wasn't really the same.

To start out my birthday celebrations, I went out with my dynasty the day before. We went to a park not far from campus and just spent a few hours exploring. It was actually really nice. It was lowkey and just about getting out and looking around at what Korea had to see.

On my birthday, ironically, Fulbright had scheduled an extracurricular activity. A cooking class. In Seoul! It was so cool. I love cooking and so I ended up literally spending my birthday in a hot room making kimbap and japchae. It tasted so good when we finished. They also sang me happy birthday in Korean and I got to wear the birthday crown. Although it wasn't how I would have wanted to spend my birhtday, it was still a lot of fun and I'm glad to have gotten the experience of spending it in Korea.

When I moved in with my host family, they asked me when my birthday was, I told them that they had just missed it. They later surprised me with cake and told me that even though they missed it, they still wanted to celebrate it. I'm so thankful for them making the effort to make me feel like I really belonged there.





(Sorry for the short post. This post is predated back to original posting time, however, my original post got deleted somehow and this is a replacement from memory 6 months later)