Feeling a bit homey

For some reason I've been lacking the motivation to make another blog post. I think I want to blame it on this busy time of year.

We will be moving soon. Our housing is taken care of by Isaac's company, so at least for the most part we don't have to handle the paperwork and coordination. We have looked at 5 different apartments within a 10 minute radius of our current place, and finally seem to have found one that will work out.

Looking for a new place was kind of funny. All of the apartments we looked at were in high rise 20 story buildings like ours, and even had the exact same layout of ours, with only minor changes like a mirrored floor plan or no closet. I felt like I wasn't quite sure what I should be checking out in these places. They all looked so similar to our own, just filled with other peoples' junk. Luckily Isaac and our company's real estate person were there to assess important things while I got distracted by photographs, friendly children and pets.

Our new place is only a 10 minute walk from where we are now, but boy does it seem far after settling into our current apartment. Isaac and I catch ourselves being sentimental, admiring how nice it is that our home overlooks a busy street corner, with so many businesses just outside our front door.

This is our street corner. In the top right corner is our apartment building, and although this picture is blurry, perhaps you can tell or imagine that there are plenty of resources nearby for whatever we quickly need or want to grab. Next to our apartment building you can see the headlights of several waiting cars. If you walk ten minutes up that street, you will reach our new place. So it's not such a long ways of course, but we have gotten a bit spoiled I guess. Our new place will be on the 19th floor so it has quite the nice view, and we share the elevator with less than half as many units as we do now, so that's wonderful too.

While I'm talking about areas that have begun to feel like home, I'll mention this place too. Yeongtong is a comfortable 20 minute walk from our house now, and this distance may decrease slightly once we move. It's where you go if you want to "go to town", having a movie theater and two large brand department/walmart/mall type stores. I don't know what you call these kind of stores, but they remind me of all three of those, having a little bit of everything.

Here's a shot of the main road through Yongteong. On the right is Home Plus and on the left (behind the building with trees on top, has a slanted odd roof) is Lotte Mart. These stores usually have one floor that is a large grocery store, another floor with a food court and other floors that feel like department stores with small sections and overly eager staff. Customer service tends to be outrageously good and attentive in South Korea, to the point where it is sometimes annoying.

The Lotte Mart on the left is where the movie theater is that I mentioned before, and its glowing red sign is visible from the 19th floor of our future place. On my recent trips inside these big stores, I took just a few photos of things that are a bit different.

Sloped escalators are the standard way to traverse between floors. When you push a big shopping cart onto it, the wheels automatically lock up, preventing them from rolling forwards or backwards.

These stores are so big, and there is such a large variety of many things. But the bread aisle is just sad. It's a little less than half the length on one side, and even of that, only a third is what I would consider "normal bread". If you look in the picture, what is closest on the left and bottom looks most familiar. Mostly, breads are sold in smaller loaves and packets, and they are more Asian style breads made with rice flour. These tend to be very fluffy, light and sweet, but not what I hope to find on a bread aisle. I've given up the search for finding whole wheat bread, I just don't think it's going to happen.

Now the instant noodle section is no joke! There are one and a half aisles (three sides, hope that makes sense) full of more speedy meals than you can ever imagine. The store was quite crowded this day, so I tried my best to only take shots where people weren't standing. But take my word for it, there are a lot of noodles.

I took a shot of the candy aisle just because it was so bright and cheerful. It is multicultural as well, having a wide selection of candies from all over the world, especially Japan, Europe and America. I guess people can compromise on other foods, but they need their comfort candy from home.

It wouldn't be Korea without aisles full of potted meats and special displays of Spam. It still seems odd to me that Spam is so popular here. Around Korean Thanksgiving back in September, I even saw special gift sets of Spam, decorated cans carefully laid in red velvety cases. We speculated before that it is because of the Korean War. The land and people were in a poor state back then after so much war and harsh occupation; food, especially meat, was scarce. American troops and their Spam must have been a welcomed sight. Please let me know if you know more about this. I'm very curious! It is such a quaint western influence, I can't help but think we have better things to offer the world than Spam.

The meat and fish sections of these stores are no joke either. Next time I go with Isaac I'll try to work up the courage to snap a few pictures to share. One more detail, since we were shopping.

I still struggle with quickly pulling out the right change at the register, the extra tens place still throws me off I guess. 1,000 won is a little less than 100 cents. So if my total is 8760 won from buying a few fruits and veggies, I've got to find 760 won in coins. Not a big deal, just a bit awkward after being used to credit cards and cents. I do like the simplicity of the coins. They say the amount on the face, like "five hundred won", and just say "Bank of South Korea" on the back.

I'm sorry if this post was kind of rambling. December has a way of scrambling the brains. I think our upcoming move and the holiday season has us feeling a little off kilter. I'm holding out for a white Christmas though, just over a week away from the big day and it's not an impossibility. I guess we'll see.