Happy Birthday to Me

And now.....finally....the awesome birthday post.

As some know, my 26th birthday was last Friday night (crap 26 is old!). A birthday is exciting enough, but for this day our band also booked a concert/open mic night at the local bar. It ended up being a decent night, so I'll break into the pictures and details:

Here's the band playing anyway, the only new song we learned for the night was 'Summer of 69,' which rocked the house. I think the picture below is while playing Toto 'Africa' because I'm next to the keyboard.

Here's another picture, where I think we're playing 'Sweet Child of Mine', because Adrian has to sit down in a chair to play the solo.

So this night we actually got some people to come up and sing some open mic songs. We had a song from Adrian and then a few songs sung by a girl named Melissa with Adrian playing guitar. She learned some Lady Gaga songs which sounded pretty good. Unfortunately I have no pictures of this, though. There were also songs sung by Crystal and Sade. Crystal sang a 4 Non Blondes song and Sade sang 'Tik Tok' with me playing keyboard.

I picked the Cat Steven's song 'Peace Train' which is a really good song, but I did it no justice. It was my birthday, though, so nobody could hold it against me really. I tried to salvage some dignity by playing a popular Korean song by CN Blue, which people liked. The bartender Hong ran to the stage to sing with me and it turned out pretty well:

So after some more songs from the band it was time to celebrate my birthday. Megan, who came to town for my birthday was nice enough to get me this awesome tiger cake. I pulled a pretty clumsy move and elbowed it off of the counter, almost ruining the poor thing, but some efforts were made to salvage it and it turned out OK:

So then they played a happy birthday song and I stood there:

The best part of celebrating a birthday in Korea is that the bars will put on a pyrotechnic show. So the bartenders did a dance throwing around beer bottles ala 'Cocktail', and then they waved around a stick with flames on the ends. There was also some fire breating where they spit out a mouthful of alcohol while lighting it on fire. Pretty over the top. Pretty ridiculous. Pretty awesome.

So they flipped some bottles around more and made me a happy birthday shot. It was actually a glass sized shot. They made Megan and I cross arms while chugging and then kiss afterwards which was pretty awkward since my face was covered some kind of pink mixture. Strange times. But really fun.

Well thats pretty much what a birthday party consists of in Korea, it's a special bonus we get being English teachers in this country. I got a gift the next day, too, from one of my Kindergarten students which was really sweet:

That's all for now, see you next time!