Saturday, March 6, 2010

Birthday fun. Seoul, Nikon, and photoshop...

This past week was a milestone for me I suppose. I turned twenty five. As my sister "lovingly" put it, I am half way to fifty. (Thanks Jenn.- by the way, you are half way to sixty) I have never really celebrated my birthday in any large capacity. Given that it is within a week of my sisters and the fact that I am a pastor's kid (meaning we didn;t have a huge amount of money) birthdays were never ranked much higher than a cake and friends or as I got older movies and embarrassing singing at the annual restaraunt of our choosing.

This year we decided to change all that. The weekend before my birthday started out with a trip to Kumho World (금호월두). It is a multi-level store that sells everything from toilets to furniture to instruments. We typically go for the computer section as it is the only retailer that sells Apple products that we have found. We went in and headed straight to our planned sales counter. NIKON. We walked up and the guy kind of didn;t take us seriously until I told him it was my birthday and pointed to the beautiful D90 on the shelf. We purchased a new camera, Two lenses, a cleaning kit, and a travel bag. All of which were really nice and some of which were complimentary from our salesman since we were making such a big purchase. Towards the end of our buying frenzy he handed me a remote and said Happy birthday. It was a great start to the week.

From there we got our stuff together for church on Sunday and left shortly after a quick afternoon lunch with our school principle. We headed to U Square (the bus terminal) and bought our tickets to Seoul. We splurged an extra five bucks each and got the luxury buses. The seats recline a rediculous amount. It is like first class airplane recliner. Nice. We arrived in Seoul around seven and were met at the Seoul Gangnam terminal. One of our friends from university, Ryan, and his super awesome newly wedded wife Christina helped us grab our bags, took us to our Hotel, the Hawaiian, and took us out to a great dinner. It was our first non-"koreanized" Italian food in months. It was amazing! We cant wait to go back.

The weekend progressed and we hit some awesome spots including the palace, Butterfingers (western breakfast joint= amazing), a Nore Bang (Korean Karaoke rooms/bar), an amazing German restaurant, and a stop by a piercing place to get my nose re-done. (SIDE NOTE: I took my other one out for our last church job. I figure why not? It didn't help me keep that job. haha) We ended the week with a sad goodbye and a trip back to the terminal in Seoul. We only walked around for forty minutes looking for the Honam line inside the terminal. :) We caught a bus nearly ten minutes later. At least nine of which were used scrambling to find a bathroom before the three hour trek home to Gwangju. We arrived safely home around three in the morning and hit the sack. Happy birthday to me. haha

It has been great. Playing with my Nikon, editing all the photos with photoshop (cs4) that was gotten for me by our friend Peter, who teaches at the other campus of our school, and just enjoying possibly the biggest birthday celebration I have had to date. So despite the fact that I am half way to fifty, it was a pretty awesome time.

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