She said that she was very touched and talked about it several times afterwards to her classmates and other friends. But honestly I don’t think I’m made for events like this. I worried about the cake the entire night, it was very hot and I couldn’t put it in our fridge because she would discover it the first thing in the morning. I also couldn’t put it in our room because we don’t use our air-con so it wouldn’t be cold enough. The lighter that I bought for the candles was terrible and I now have blisters on my thumb because of it… But oh well it seems that it was a success anyways and she was very happy. She kept saying that she would have cried if it had been late on the day (we are both quite similar that way: completely stoned in the morning).
We headed to school soon after and met up afterwards to sign up for extra activities: the language department has three different clubs that foreigners can join: Dance club, photography club and singing club. I knew that the dancing club wouldn’t be for me (I still have to work on my coordination) but I had a hard time choosing between photography and singing. In the end we both joined the singing club.
We headed to the canteen with Lokty and people from Kiki’s class. In my class we all know each other but we don’t spend time together outside of school, Lokty’s class is similar to mine but Kiki’s class seem to be very close. The only problem here is that they all speak Mandarin together. Fortunately I sat next to a girl who spoke a bit of English so we had fun joking around and joining in on the other’s conversation, plus Kiki is usually quite good at telling me what is going on. It was a lot of fun and we sat in the canteen and talked for almost 3 hours before we parted ways (after deciding on a time to meet up for dinner downtown).
We all headed home for a short break before a couple of us met up in front of the school at 6 pm and headed down the street to Shinchon (a district close to our uni). There was a quite big event there that we all wanted to attend: a 2PM fan-signing event. For all of my kpop newcomers: 2PM are a korean boy band famous for having ‘beastly’ looks (as in big muscles).
People suddenly started screaming again and we were bewildered for a moment, thinking that they might come outside to greet the fans, until we realised that it was because live images were being send on the big screen in front of the shop. Here is an amazing fact about Korean fangirl: they queued for about four hours to see them go into the building and then waited for another two hours to see them go back to their car. We stayed for half an hour (mainly because we were waiting for someone else to join us). Then we headed to the subway to go to DongDaeMun (were we had planned to go for dinner).
One of Kiki’s classmates knew a really good and famous restaurant here so we headed out to find it to get us some chicken stew (the dish that it is the most famous for).
Diner was amazing and really filling. All of the girls spoke mandarin together so I just ate diligently. Thankfully Lokty was sitting next to me so she would sometimes translate to the best extend of her English.
Brief introduction: asian girl-girl friendships. I kind of felt that I had to say a couple of words on this, even though I myself find it very natural a lot of foreigners seem startled by it at first. Asian girl-girl friendships are slightly different from others in that asian girls are often more tied together and closer in a slightly different way: constantly holding hands while walking on the streets, often resting on each other’s shoulders, and non-stop hugging. non-asian friendship are slightly different in this aspect as girls don’t tend to hold hands and usually shy away from any such ‘skin-ship’. All that to say that asian ‘girl-friends’ seem to be very close to each other quite quickly. I was casually holding hands with Lokty on the evening of our first meeting, for example. What makes that kind of friendship different: well it just seems, and quickly becomes, a very caring friendship.