Talk about an early morning! With our bodies definitely NOT on Korean time yet, the boys woke up extra early (I'm talking like 3 or 5 am.....maybe both, I can't remember...lack of sleep at that time makes me forget!). That was rough. Talton took off from work that day (it was a Friday) as well as the following Monday to help us get adjusted over the weekend. The boys ate cereal for breakfast, and then Talton made us hashbrowns and toast (per my request....comfort food, you know?), so they had some of that too.
With us getting in past 8 pm the night before, this morning was the first time for us to check out our view of Haeundae Beach where we lived. Beautiful!
We spent the day playing and being really lazy as we were trying to allow our bodies to adjust to this 14 hour time difference. We took a couple naps in there throughout the day too. The hard part was when Talton woke us up that afternoon after napping for a couple hours. All we wanted to do was sleep a little while longer, but he insisted on us getting up to help our bodies get adjusted and so we'd still be tired at night time later.
The boys were thrilled to play with toys and watch movies they hadn't seen in two months!
Chicken nuggets and tator tots for lunch. It was nice to have this familiar food, and it was even nicer that Talton was home to make our food all day so we could be lazy. :)
P.S. Nevermind the fact that we're all still in our pajamas at lunch time. Like I said, it was a very lazy day with naps sprinkled in.
P.S.S. Ignore the mess of a kitchen, dining room table, and condo in general. It stayed that way for probably way too long, but this time change took so much energy out of our bodies that it was hard to focus on anything other than trying to follow our normal routine.
That evening, I told Talton I wanted to brave the grocery store for the first time, since we needed to get some things anyway. Our first grocery store experience was at E-Mart. It's basically like a Walmart with the various items they sell (clothes, electronics, groceries, toys, a coffee store, a small ice cream store, a hair place, and even a car place to get your oil changed and/or washed as you shop), but it's multi levels that you access by escalator.
There are two grocery stores here that we frequent, E-Mart and Home Plus, as well as Costco. When we first arrived in Korea, we hit up all three places every week to get our groceries. That was exhausting as you can imagine, so we soon decided to go to Home Plus on the weekend all together (they have basically the same stuff as E-Mart and we prefer the bread from Home Plus) and Talton goes to Costco on Monday evenings on his way home from work.
At E-Mart and Home Plus, you can only use a cart if you put a 100 won (around 8 cents in the U.S.) coin in the cart, which will unlatch it from the rest of the carts. When you're finished shopping, you can latch it back together with the other carts, and it'll spit your 100 won coin back out. It keeps them from having to send people out to fetch carts from the parking lot, which in turn means that carts are not occupying parking spaces that people would otherwise like to park in. Great idea!
The cart wheels stick to the escalator, so you don't even have to hold on to your cart on the escalator. Love that! What I don't love about these carts is that all four wheels turn, and that makes it very hard to control in the store.
Seeing prices like "1,470" for a box of plastic baggies was very weird at first. It's moments like this when I was quickly reminded that I was not in the U.S. anymore.
A pink frog was a first...
Now this rocks and should be implemented in parking garages everywhere! Each spot has a light over it that shines green when the spot is available to be parked in and red when the spot is occupied. It's a great tool when you're at the end of the aisle looking down to see if any spots are open. That way, you don't waste time going up and down aisles.
Oh, and here's our car we have while we're here (the black Kia Sorento)...
The first day kind of flew by because we were in and out of it with naps and all. It was nice to experience a little of Korea at the grocery store, but we were ready to get back home, eat some dinner, bathe some kids, and hit the sack.
