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!

Happy Birthday to Bu(ddha)

Last weekend was a really eventful one. It actually felt like about 2 weekends within one. Well, actually it was a long weekend of three days, so it was more like 2 weekends in a weekend and a half. Still, an eventful weekend.

It started Thursday night when the band was supposed to play a show. We unfortunately found out an hour before we were supposed to play that they weren't expecting us to play a show that night. Some kind of gap in communications. We were pretty upset and ended up drinking kind of a lot.

This becomes important because our singer Jake ended up setting up a show for us just down the street. So we called all of our friends over there and played a set with the three of us in the band being pretty hammered, and it didn't go extremely well. There were definitely a lot of missed notes, words, and some timing issues. It could have been worse, but we got a lot of sympathy comments which stung a little.

So with that over with, the next day, Friday, was a holiday in Korea because it's Buddha's birthday. I don't really know a lot about this holiday, but I still headed to Seoul to meet my friend Megan and her sister to go to a lantern lighting in honor of Buddha's birthday.

Our plan was to go on the bus tour, so we met around that area and there were a lot of fountains. I ran through one.

There was also this giant silhouette of a woman hammering something, which was cool.

And some strange giant shoe made out of a bunch of regular sized shoes:

The bus tour was booked for the rest of the day, so we decided to just play some frisbee and then walk along the river to where the temple is. Here's a picture of Megan and her sister Becky along the river walk.

So we walked over to Insadong where the Jogyesa Temple is for the lighting ceremony. They have a whole bunch of lanterns kind of like being under a tent or something. Next to the temple there were some monks and some women all bowing in front and then a man who did a chant for about an hour. There were even little boy monks who were super cute. One fell asleep and had to be carried away.

At the temple was this cutesy looking Buddha statue with happy anime eyes.

People were filing into the temple for something, but I'm not sure what it was.

We had gotten there a little after seven, and the lantern lighting happened after sunset. So we were waiting there until after 8 o'clock listening to a man doing chanting and a lot of people were singing with, but we didn't know what they were singing about. Finally, the lanterns were lit and and everyone was happy.

So actually the most exciting part of the night was after this ceremony when we went to this little hof (drinking place) called Johannes Brahms, themed after the composer. We ordered a bottle of wine. As the woman was at the bar opening our bottle, Megan says "Oh my god, there's something on her leg!" Megan had watched something run across the floor and up the woman's leg. I looked over, and it was this giant hideous cockroach bigger than my thumb. It continued running all up and down the woman's leg and we decided to let her know about it. So she inspected her leg and the roach ended up running up the woman's shirt. She finally saw it, and freaked out and brushed it off of her. At this point the cockroach ran behind a shelf directly behind my chair.

We all looked at each other, startled at this event, and Megan says "you guys, chug the wine we have to get out of here." I was a little freaked and couldn't drink anything for a few minutes, but eventually was able to down a glass. Another woman in the bar went to the bathroom and on the way back the roach was following her to her seat. It was a super aggressive Korean cockroach.

We stood up as if to leave and the lady just packaged our bottle for us to take it home. We got out of there as quickly as possible, but the lady still charged us for these nuts that we orded and didn't have time to eat. That stung a little bit, but at least we made it out of the bar without being attacked.

A New Piece to the Band

After the first show, our band (still tentatively Iron Kimchi) was picking new songs to play. One song that kept coming up was Toto 'Africa'. I think everyone knows this is a really great song, and we were determined to play it. One small problem is that there are parts of the song that need a keyboard because they are just too difficult to recreate on guitar.

With some searching around and then a trip to Lotte Mart, I decided to pick up this beautiful 61 key piano. It only cost about $90 American, and definitely sounds good enough to get the job done.

All that was left, then was to learn how to play the song. Some Youtube searching uncovered this miraculous video that shows all of the notes to play to completely recreate the song. How easy is that?

Actually, it's not that easy. I did learn most of the song, though, so wish me luck tonight as we play it live for the first time.

Open Mic NIght

Good news everyone: I have joined a band. This started when my friend Adrian was trying to set up an open mic night at a local club. We arranged for it and had three people to play. Since we knew that it was probably going to be just us three (Me, Adrian, and this other guy who sings named Jake), and we decided to get together and learn some cover songs to fill some time. We practiced for about two weeks, learned about 8 songs (SERIOUSLY 8 SONGS!), and had our opening mic night last Tuesday.

We got a really great turnout of English teachers and Korean people for the night. It started with fog machines and Adrian playing the opening song "Falling Slowly" at the request of the Korean owners of the club.

I have a few pictures from the night thanks to my friend Megan who came to visit for that night (you may remember her from pillow fight day). This first picture is from the bands first song. We sang this Korean song called "Nobody" which I have actually posted on this blog before. We had the bartenders sing it because Korean is really hard.

The lineup for 'Nobody' (left to right): Jake, Adrian, Hong, Me, Panda

From there the band played a few more songs, and then a solo song or two from the three of us, and then a few more songs to play out the night. The set list looked like this:

Falling Slowly

Nobody

Sweet Child of Mine

No Rain

I'm Yours

Solo Sets:

Flume (Me)

It's the End of the World as We Know It (Jake and Adrian)

Bizarre Love Triangle (Jake and Me)

(Adrian)

And to finish out:

A Little Help from my Friends

Crazy

I Will Survive

Smells Like Teen Spirit

Here's another picture of me from the night; I'm not sure what song it is:

It ended up being a really great night and I'm pretty sure everybody enjoyed the set. We're going to play another show on the 20th. There's only one problem, which is that our band doesn't have an official name yet. We have a few ideas, but aren't set on anything. The ideas are: 96% (an inside joke), and Iron Kimchi. These aren't super great, so if anyone has ideas I'll look forward to reading them in the comments.