Day 15: Celine's birthday!

Today was Celine's birthday!

For a couple of days, Celine had been eyeing the cheesecake down in the convenience store so the night before, I decided to buy her some in the morning.

I forgot to set my own alarm and when I did  wake up in the morning from Celine's alarm, which she slept through, I was so confused that I just felt back asleep. Once I woke again, Celine was awake and on her phone but not facing me.
I put on the necessary amount of clothes for it be socially acceptable, grabbed my card, and went down to the GS25 that is connected to our dorm.

On my way back, the elevators refused to cooperate and so I had to run all the way up to 6th floor where our room is.

I stood there for a moment before bursting into the room, singing the birthday song for her, and, in the end, handing her the cheesecake. She got really happy!

The rest of the morning I played every single birthday related song I could find for her and dancing really ugly to put a smile on her face from the beginning of the day.

Celine ate the cheesecake on our way to class.

Today was the first day we were going to have our class on Media Communication in Korea. It was actually a really interesting class! I told myself that I needed to bring my laptop from now on because we get so many useful informations thrown at us that I don't have time to write them all down.

Isabella 씨 is also taking this class with us!

After class we went to the KLI building. First Isabella was going to talk to the office about moving down a level from level 4. She was not ready at all for yet another day in the level 4 class and had decided that taking level 3 and then a re exam once we returned to Denmark would be better than staying at her current level.

Celine and I waited outside for her.

They let Isabella move down and gave her a slip of paper, telling her where to go later for her new class. We crossed our fingers that we'd be in the same class as her.
Afterwards we went to all buy books together for our new class. I gave 56000₩ (≈ 50USD or 300 DKK) for 3 books.

Now that this was out of the way, we decided to walk back to campus for lunch. We were taking her to the food court that Lloyd and his friend had showed us the day before.

There were MANY more people today! At least the line moved pretty fast.

Today I had a chicken breast salad. The same kind I saw Lloyd eating yesterday.
Celine and Isabella had to wait quite long compared to me today because they ordered the carbonara and some seafood pasta.

In the afternoon when we went to class, we met our teacher from the first day, who led us to our new classroom. Amazing! I had had a deep down fear that they would somehow have changed their mind and decided to keep us on level 2 anyways. But no. Phew.
When we entered, we saw that both Isabella and our junior from Denmark, Sandra, were in our class. Yes!

This level was much better for us. The reading, writing, and grammar parts were all still too easy for us. But the speaking is on another level. We haven't really had much focus on speech these past two semesters and the Korean they use here is SO VERY DIFFERENT from what we used in Denmark. Our teacher opens her mouth and then it just doesn't close for the next 2 hours.

Johanne and I had talked about doing something for Celine on her birthday but Isabella wasn't too up for it because of some things she had to take care of. It was also pretty hard to make any real plans when our class ended that late in the evening so we decided to celebrate Celine during the weekend instead.

I still wanted Celine to celebrate as much as possible today so we followed Celine's craving for fried chicken and went back to the place in Sinchon that we had eaten at on the day of our placement test.

It was warm today outside but still raining. We say in Denmark that if it rains on your birthday, you've been a bad person for the past year. Baaaaad Celine!

While we were sitting there, Celine got a message on Kakaotalk from Wonjun, the Korean mentor that we met on Orientation Day, asking if it was her birthday today.

When she told him yes, he asked us to meet him later and then he'd buy her Baskin-Robbins ice cream, which she'd never had.

We tried to figure out a time to meet but he didn't have time before late in the night. 11pm is pretty late on a normal workday when you have class the next day. This was one of the moments that you could truly feel the cultural difference because Koreans seem to tend to stay out suuuuper late always and never get enough sleep.

We tried planning a time to meet and walked around Sinchon, just sightseeing while waiting for Wonjun to reply.

It ended up that Wonjun would come to our dorm at 10.30pm so we could just go straight to bed after meeting him.

Thus, we headed home and had a wild umbrella sword fight that Celine sadly won.

Wonjun finally came and we sat down with him outside the dorm.
It was such a huge thing that he had brought cake! We thought birthdays weren't really celebrated in Korea compared to in Denmark but Wonjun told us that they always used birthdays as an excuse to get together and eat cake in Korea. In Denmark, it's usually the birthday person, who makes the cake and invites over people to eat it.

It wasn't just ice cream that Wonjun bought but an entire ice cream cake! I tried taking pictures but Celine's excitement was too real and I only caught these blurry but happy moments of her.

He'd bought a Ryan cake!! Ryan is one of the mascots of Kakaotalk, the messenger app most commonly used in Korea, and a widely known character!

It came in a box with dry ice. We were impressed.

Then Wonjun brought out spoons and told her that there were little lights too that she had to put in.

Celine's reaction:

Forget about putting them in an orderly fashion. Celine made a unicorn-alien-bear.

It was time to light the candles! There were only two matches and both times we lit the candles, they died out. Wonjun made me run over to a group of people and ask for a lighter in Korean. That brought a lot of laughter to both Wonjun and Celine and the group.

We lit it but it died out again really fast. I wonder if it was because of the humidity?

Anyways! We gave up and decided to just eat the cake.

 Wonjun stayed with us until a little past midnight before returning to his own dorm some 10-minutes away or so.

I want to end this post with a happy, derpy picture so he's one from when I was washing my face in the evening, was surprised by Celine, and put some in her face as well.

It's a happy life.