Shopping with Dee

I am really getting close to my neighbor. I really like her a lot. She is so nice and friendly. I feel very lucky to have met her! She has a van and usually will just drive between the three camps (George, Henry and Walker) but she said she would attempt to go to this toy store she had seen with her husband. She told me she would be willing to go out and leave post more often if she had someone to go with. There are a lot of stay at home mom's here and we talk to them almost daily when taking the boys to school but no one wants to go anywhere. I guess they would just rather stay at home?

Anyways..Friday we set out right about 9 am to find the Toy Store and to go to Walmart. She said there was a McDonald's in it. First we got some money and meant to go to the money changer to get won but totally forgot to do it. While driving towards where she thought the store was we passed Home Plus. This one is much closer than the one I have been to previously. Dee said it is new. So we decided what the heck and went.

I was really excited to see a bunch of toys! And Dee (unlike Court) loves to walk about and look at everything! WOOHOO found a shopping buddy at last! There were a lot of toys I wanted to buy for Abby's birthday (it's on the 20th) but since I had only 15,000 in won I could not really do much shopping. Here is what one of the floors looked like.

I am glad we have the commissary and PX to shop at but the good thing is if we didn't or if I wanted to I could still get some familiar brands. Here is some Pantene shampoo.

Here is Miss Maddie Patty. She really really wanted to go down the escalators and was waiting for me so she could go.

I know I have mentioned the escalators before but I must say...they are just AWESOME! The U.S. really needs to borrow this idea. You push your cart onto the escalator and on the wheels are magnets that stick you to the ramp and away you go. Here is a better view of the up and down escalators. Since space is so precious here all of the stores build up instead of out. So you can do all of your shopping on the various floors and then check out and go.

We went down the escalator to my favorite place to take pictures in a store...the grocery area. And since Dee likes to look we went up and down every single aisle! YAY! I am getting braver about taking pictures. So this time I got a lot of the various fish available. The smell can be really really overwhelming and I am an anti-fish person so sometimes it bothers me.

Here is Maddie looking at the live sea food for sale. This picture has clams. Not pictured were a shark, some funky fish that did not look so healthy and some sort of an eel.

I have no idea what those are in the picture above.

Octopus...or is that octopi?? I remember seeing the Amazing Race episode where they were in Seoul. One of the challenges was to eat live octopus that was chopped up and still wriggling about. I guess the suckers were sticking to their cheeks and tongue. Personally I prefer my food dead, cooked and not moving when I eat it. But to each his own eh?

More fish. These were kind of interesting looking because their tails were really long.

Here is Maddie near the same fish and not at all happy about being that close!

Here are some squid. It is really popular here. A lot of people eat it dried as a snack.

Various little fishies and other items for sale.

This guy was making patties to cook up. Not sure what kind of patties they were.

They had a small food area so I snapped a picture of this.

Here is Dee posing with some coffee in a little bag. I should have gotten some. I really really have been enjoying the various brands of iced coffee. They just don't serve it in large enough containers for me so I end up buying two.

Here we go onto some familiar brands. Kelloggs cereal above. Oreos below.

Above..I am pretty sure this is "Gogurt" which my girls love to eat.

This picture above is for Sun chips. Now I know we have Sun Chips back home. I am not sure if these are the same or not. Can you guess the brand of chips below?

We paid for our purchases. I ended up with some gum called Xylotol (or something like that) and some drinks for the girls. Headed out to the parking garage and bought 2 coffees for myself from this machine. They are iced coffee and soooooo good but really tiny. I have tried the Chilsung cider and it is ok. It is like sprite but 100 times sweeter.

We left Home Plus and made our way back to the Camp George area to change money for shopping. Dee tried to do an illegal U-turn and about 4 cars were honking at her so we drove on ahead for awhile and turned around and came back. I went to the money changer all by myself. Handed the guy $80 and got back around 82,000 won. We decided to go to the Dong-A shopping center. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But...it was lunch time and there was a ton of traffic. By the time we got in there we did not have much time to shop. The girls were hungry. We just went to the food court area. I am a little afraid to make Maddie try much in the way of Korean food since I have no idea what the ingredients are and she is allergic to so many things. I decided to get her some chips and a drink to last her until we got home. I got a bag of Bugles (finger chips as we call them) and some Apple juice. I bought 2 corn (?) dogs for myself and Abby. The breading was questionable so just pulled that off and offered the hot dog (?). No one ate them so I just tossed them and we had some chips.

I took this picture for Mom because it is chocolate. I have no idea if it tastes good or not but it was very pretty to look at.

Can you guess what these are?

Here is the last picture for this adventure. The sign in the parking garage.

After leaving the food court area Dee and I decided we had better head back home since we had to pick the boys up from school. I am glad we did since traffic was pretty heavy. We had enough time to go home and unload and head to the school.

Later that evening Dee came up and changed my finger nail polish.

Monday we are planning on trying to get to Walmart again and this time I have won to spend. I still have to get Abby's birthday gifts. So stay tuned for more pictures!