I've been in South Korea for a total of two months now and a lot of my friends have had their birthdays and mine is just around the corner! Since my birthday is coming up, I decided to ask a Korean friend of mine about her birthday experience and how birthdays in South Korea are celebrated. South Koreans have a special set of traditions around birthdays. In fact, everyone ages together on the 1st of January after New Year's and if you are born before New Year's, you are already a year older. The time you spent in your mother's tummy counts as one year for Koreans! For example, you are born right before New Year's and you are one! New Year's comes around and then you turn two. You celebrate your birthday again later but you aren't considered to age on that day. A little confusing at first, right? Koreans still celebrate their birthday on the actual day with cake and candles just like us but when it is New Year's everyone celebrates with a soup that they finish in order to age. So, you are actually older in Korea than you are in the United States!
South Korea goes by a special age created many years ago in ancient China. Instead of going by a cardinal number system (i.e. 0,1,2,3,4), they go by an ordinal number system (i.e. 1,2,3,4) where zero doesn't exist. Of course, with changing times, most of their numbers are cardinal but the age remains a special tradition in South Korea. It is the only nation in the world that uses this system today. Also, after your New year's celebration/birthday, if you are freshly two, you get a celebration called Dol (pronounced as dul), or literally two in the Korean number system.
