생일주가함니다 in English: "Happy Birthday to you"

Today is my birthday and I'm celebrating Korean style. This means that I had birthday soup and white rice for breakfast (birthday soup is a broth with seaweed and beef in it), I had some of my friends over to the house for a few hours on Saturday, tonight I am going out to dinner, and I have received numerous very Korean birthday presents (a Korean birthday present is usually something like a pair of socks, scarf, chocolates, earings, CD, stationary, etc.). Last Saturday evening my Korean mother asked me to invite my friends over for a birthday party with lots of Korean food and cake. So I invited my fellow Fulbright friends over for a party that started at 6:30pm and ended at 9pm. My mother had prepared an enormous amount of food, ranging from dok boki (Korean rice noodles in a spicy red sauce with a sort of fish cake that resembles tofu), chop che (sort of like a Korean version of lo mein), little sausages (possibly SPAM), dok (rice cake with red bean paste filling), fried chicken and sweet sesame chicken wings (this is considered American food and was ordered from the fried chicken place). We had a nice gathering in the middle of my host family's living room (my host mother moved the two pieces of furniture, a cot and a low round table, out of the way and set up three long rectangle tables.) It was very festive and my friends enjoyed seeing another Korean home; I'm finding that we all live in very different situations (my home is distinctly Korean-style, whereas some are living in more westernized apartments.) Today feels like little less than a school day and that is how a Korean birthday is celebrated. Birthdays are not a very big deal here, in part because age does not change until the new year. In Korea I was 27 before today and I will be 27 tomorrow; however, in America I was 25 yesterday and today I am 26 (this is a whole separate issue which I have no time to delve into at the present moment.) It is a bit complicated, but the way that Koreans calculate birthdays is with the New Year, so everyone who was born the year that you were born is the same age as you. This makes sense also, because in Korean society the only people who are considered your true equals or "friends" are the people who were born in the same year as you. This is all part of the Confucian hierarchy that I constantly refer to in these blogs, because it is the underlying source of many modern customs and behaviors. To further complicate matters, when you are born you are 1 year old, whereas in America you are 0 years old. All of this accounts for the discrepancy between my American age and my Korean age (most people are only a year older in Korean years, but because I have birthday that is late in the year, I there is a 2 year discrepancy for most of the year). I keep telling my students that I must go back to America so I can be young again. Although this started off as a joke, there's nothing like a looming 28th Korean birthday (New Year's) to make me feel that perhaps I really do need to go back to America before I start feeling my Korean age, or even worse... acting my Korean age.