shopping for shoes

At home in Houston, I only shop at Stride Rite for the boys' shoes.  They've never let me down.  They're great quality, last forever, and fit the boys' feet really well (especially if we have to get a WIDE shoe).  Unfortunately and I'm sure quite shocking to you (Do you sense the sarcasm?), there is not a Stride Rite in Busan, South Korea.  There are actually two of them in Seoul, however, but that's several hours away.  We're planning to visit Seoul some time in the near future, but since we don't know when that will be, we decided to go ahead and buy shoes here.

We knew going in to the store that there was a very good chance they wouldn't speak English, and they didn't.  We were prepared to motion, point, and gesture as necessary to get our point across.  We also had hopes that they would have one of those measuring tools you stand on to measure your shoe size, but they didn't.  We figured that out when Talton asked, "Can you measure their feet?", and the guy just looked at him the way I'm sure we do when people speak Korean to us.  "Measure?", as he gestures what a ruler would look like.  "Their feet?  Size?", as he points to their feet.  Taking off Connar's shoe and showing him the U.S. size proved to be the best course of action here.  With the boys wearing sandals out that day, I quickly pulled out some back-up socks I had buried at the bottom of the diaper bag so we could be sure the shoes fit with socks.  After trying on a few different sizes for each boy, these are the shoes we ended up buying.  Connar's are on the left, and Parker's are on the right.  Aren't their first Korean bought shoes adorable?!  :)