The view of the bridge from said tower:
The duck boats all in a row:
The bridge spanning the vast graveyard of lotus flowers:
Graffiti on the tower, the bridge, and the sea of lotus skeletons:
Apparently earlier in the year this whole place is flooded with lotus flowers:
A quaint set of wooden steps under a pretty orange tree:
An interesting, more traditional pavilion:
There was also a traditional swing there, which you ride standing up. It was a lot of fun.
Then we went to the 1st Birthday Party!
The mother wore her traditional hanbok, and the twins wore cute little baby hanboks, too. Photos were taken of the parents and the twins in front of a huge table on a stage and then the grandparents came up and posed with them.
I’m sorry that I don’t have any photos from the birthday party itself, but I was busy enjoying the festivities and didn’t know if I should be snapping pictures in the middle of it all, considering I’m a foreigner and just a friend of a relative.
After that we all went out and ate and the buffet was amazing and intense. All kinds of food was there, from escargot to spaghetti, from Oreo cereal to Japanese raw fish (sitting in ice on HUGE—REAL—clam shells), from cheese fondue to Chinese flower bread. It was good and I enjoyed it. I have no idea how much it must have cost to feed so many guests at such a high-end buffet. Experiencing this at all, especially considering the costs I can’t imagine, was an incredibly great privilege.
After that an MC in a Santa suit came. He didn’t have a beard, glasses, or false fat. He was just wearing the suit. He had three earrings and talked fast, I guess because he was an entertainer. He said a lot of things, introduced the twins, and let the parents say some things. He led the room in the Korean happy birthday song and he and his lovely female assistant, also in a santa suit (she with a santa hat), did a crazy-looking dance. It looked like something from a boy band concert, it was so perfectly in sync and complexly choreographed, and it was upbeat enough.
At some point an interesting traditional ritual took place. Tradtionally, on the baby’s first birthday, you put a bunch of objects on the floor and see which one the baby crawls to and chooses first. If it’s a pencil, he will be a good student. If it’s money, he will become rich. If he picks a string, he will live very long. Nowadays people don’t seem to put much stock in this tradition’s predictive ability, but they do it just for fun, and it was fun to watch. As history plowed on, the ritual’s been modified. The basket they could choose from on the stage today, for example, included a stethoscope to be a doctor, a microphone to be a public speaker or an entertainer, and a computer mouse to be a programmer (or, as I think the MC joked, to spend all day in the PC rooms playing computer games).
The elder twin had a hard time deciding what he wanted, even after the MC held up each item and danced it around in front of him. At long last he chose money, but I think maybe he felt it was too soon to commit to a career. The younger twin seemed ready to grab almost anything, but once he saw the microphone he stole it like a thief. While the MC was asking the parents something in Korean, the younger twin was trying to get his mouth all over the mic. Later, when it was time to put it back into the basket, his mother had to pry it away from him. It was funny to me how different they were in their decisions.
After that the MC asked a series of questions for entertainment gift card giveaways. At one of them my friend and her sister looked at me and said, “Put up your hand!” But I didn’t know yet what was going on and I couldn’t hear them very well so I kept asking them to tell me what they’d said again.
It turns out the MC had asked, “Who came from the farthest place?” Technically I didn’t come that far for this event, but I am from very far away, and I was the only foreigner in the whole room. So when I said I was from America, I guess I took the cake. I got to wish the twins a “Happy Birthday” (alas, I don’t know how to say it in Korean) into the mic and gained a 10,000 won (about $10) entertainment gift certificate to use in bookstores, movie theaters, etc.
After that we saw a slideshow with pictures of the mom and dad before and after they were married, then the sonogram of the twins inside of her, then several different slideshows of them from their first year on planet earth.
At the end we were given party favors to take with us, and for some reason I was given two. The favors were jars of grain, which you can wash and cook with rice. My friend told me how to do it, so sometime when I have a chance I’m going to make rice with grain.
Each one had a commemorative label on it so you would never forget the twins’ 1st Birthday.
