This year I got to spend my birthday away from home – my first time doing that!

This year on the exact day of my birthday I didn’t do anything. Lame, I know. But I like to think that my birthday celebration got spread out amongst a few days.. even though some other people might not have thought that. I also cooked dinner for myself on my birthday. And it sounds like I have no friends, but… I do.

On the day after though, since everyone was free, we went to Mr. Seowang Mandu to eat dumplings.

Everyone was asking why we were going there again, but I’ve only gone there once and Stef hadn’t even gone before.. but we went anyways, and the dumplings were delicious. Made by Chinese people too, so they’re different from the Korean style of dumlplings. The xiaolongbao not so much, but the dumplings really tasted like the ones I can get back in Vancouver.

You can find the restaurant using the MangoPlate app, or you can ask around in the Edae/Sinchon area where the restaurant is.

Then we went to Baskin Robbins for dessert. I don’t usually eat out on weekdays, nor do I usually get dessert (it’s started a streak though.. I’ve been eating a lot of dessert lately and I’m now more bloated than two weeks ago so it’s time to start working out again). But Captain America: Civil War came out a few weeks back (interesting fact: movies come out earlier in Korea than in Western countries to prevent people from pirating movies) and when Avengers: Age of Ultron came out Baskin Robbins had a special ice cream cake with different flavours of ice cream. And I was lucky enough to get that cake, but for Civil War!

There were a total of 8 different flavours. Claudia, Vivian, Stef, and I could barely finish it though. I’m really glad that I got to try the cake though, since Stef and I have been dreaming about it since Avengers: Age of Ultron came out!

Then on Friday we went to Damotori. It’s my second time going (only) but as expected, I had a lot of fun. I’ll just leave it at that – I’m sure everyone else had fun too… just not very awake fun.

I tried a soju bomb (soju with energy drink) but it tasted really gross to me… my friends said that it was way too sweet, and then they added in some beer and it tasted a bit better after that even though I don’t like beer that much. I danced a lot more than my first time as well, and the whole night (or few hours of the night) cost me only 7 000KRW. Next time I want to go to another Damotori, since there are 7.

I think that if it had been a few years back, I would have been upset that no one was celebrating my birthday with me on the day of. But now I’ve just come to realize that a birthday is really just a day, and celebrations can happen anytime. The best thing was knowing that people  who actually care about my wellbeing wished me a happy birthday, and I knew that I was being thought about.