Christmas in Korea

We've just finished our first Korean Christmas, and it's been quite the day! Since we didn't really have the option of being able to spend time with our family this year (something about being halfway around the world :P), we decided to do something a little different. As I mentioned before, Christmas pretty much amounts to a shopping holiday here, so rather than sit around all day for family to wake up, we went out exploring the town some more and getting more familiar with our city.

The first stop of the day was Art Espresso, a beautiful little coffee shop owned by Linda, the receptionist at our school. On the walk up from the subway station, I took a moment to try my hand at panoramic photography (and by hand is how I did it, as we don't yet have a tripod). You can check out the image here. When we got there, Shan ordered a green tea latte (which she says is better than anything Second Cup could even dream of making), and I (the non-coffee drinker) had a hot chocolate, which just happened also to be delicious. After a little while, Linda came in (we told her we were coming yesterday and she said she'd be there in the afternoon-we just beat her there!) and the three of us hung out together for awhile, just chatting and sharing muffins. Then Linda graciously gave us a ride back to the subway station (because she figured it was way to far to walk (twice) and she wasn't sure which bus went back down to where we wanted to be).

Next, we tested out some research I had done in my attempts to find a guitar in the city. The word was that one of the major chain stores in Korea called Home Plus had a music section in some of their locations, so we went to check out our local Home Plus store. Unfortunately, we had no success in finding guitars, but we did manage to find Pizza Hut and Skin Food (which is a Korean brand of body products not terribly unlike what you can find at the Body Shop in Canada, only way better, or so I'm told).

The third and final stop on our journey brought us to our local Costco, where we went through the fun of signing up for a membership and then exploring two full floors of pure awesomeness. We didn't actually buy anything today; we just wanted to get our membership and see just what it was like inside a foreign Costco. (For the record, it's got to be one of the easiest stores we've come across to navigate; Costco's standard layout is apparently a worldwide standard, and all of the signage was in Korean and English.)

Then came time to head back home to attempt our own homemade 삼겹살 (samgyeopsal). We had picked up the supplies the night before at the grocery store, and bought all the sauces, but we bought 갈비 (galbi) instead for meat. 삼겹살 is thick strips of pork while 갈비 is thin strips of beef ribs. We figured it would be a great experiment, as we wanted to see how easy it would be to make it at home. It turns out that there's a reason why they put the grill in the middle of the table when you go to restaurants that serve it - running back and forth to the stove with the meat is a little bit tedious :P. Also, just having the lettuce and sauces isn't quite the same as having all of the other fixings to go with it that you get at the restaurant either. Now, it was still delicious and quite filling, but I think we'll go out to a restaurant the next time we get a hankering for 삼겹살.

Not long after we finished eating and getting our pictures from the day put on Facebook, the phone started to ring, and we spent the next several hours talking to the various family and friends who called, and we're still not through everyone we want to talk to! But now it's gotten terribly late, and it's about time to head on to bed.