Sunday Afternoons

The day after Lotte World, Janice, Pauline, Jihoon, Julia, Caroline, and I met up in Gangnam to hang out with Janice one last time before she went off to Japan. For dessert, we stopped off at Ice Berry, which was the first place to make yogurt (the sweet kind) popular in Korea, according to Jihoon.

Later that afternoon, Janice's parents took me to Costco, where I stocked up on cheap(er) beef and green beans (which are surprisingly uncommon in Korea). If you've ever thought Costcos in the U.S. were madhouses on the weekends, try visiting a Korean Costco on a Sunday afternoon. It took about 15 minutes to actually get into the structure, and we had to park on the top floor. This Costco was laid out in such a way that the bottom two floors of the building were the actual store and the four floors above those were reserved for parking. Strangely, there was only one elevator servicing the entire building.

The layout inside the store barely differed from the standard layout of your typical U.S. Costco, except for the fact that the food was on the bottom floor and everything else was one floor above. Even the goods, though, were the same as the goods in U.S. Costcos, since much of the items had been imported.

This Costco's food court, in addition to being insanely overrun by hungry shoppers, also featured not just chicken bakes but "bulgogi bakes" and clam chowder, as well.

Getting out of the store was even more of an adventure than getting in. Since it would have been complete anarchy if every shopper pushing a cartload of goods had to wait for the one elevator, the Costco builders had developed an escalator system whereby slightly inclined escalators transported shoppers up to the parking levels. Each shopping cart was also integrated with the escalators so that they would lock into place and not go rolling down the escalator, knocking people over domino style. It may have been efficient, but I still felt like I was riding a conveyor belt in a giant machine.

I don't know if I've just gotten used to the size of Korean pizza, but the slice of Costco pizza I had looked grotesquely large. Is it just me?