Budget Cut

So I was planning to go to Insa-Dong today to visit the traditional stuff... but I ended up at Myeong-Dong. -_-.

It was quite unplanned........ and I ended up buying a whole bunch of stuff.....

But before that, breakfast. I really like the cafeteria food thus far...... really tasty!

But I've noticed that the kimchee I have here is so much more spicy than the ones we have in U.S. I can usually eat a little bit before feeling like I really need to drink water... but this kimchee.... I can only eat once slice and I need to eat rice. That happened at the bbq place too :( The kimchee is quite good.... I'm just weak sauce.

So back to shopping. I think Korea and Taiwan are really similar...... and so their shopping area is really similar to our night market (think... more people shop during night time, with lots of street food). And just like in Taiwan, people don't really speak English and only care about selling their product and will ignore you if you aren't planning to buy anything. The problem is.... my Korean really sucks so it's hard for me to feel like getting up the courage to ask questions and etc if they ignore me :( Bleh.

Anyways, back to shopping. So I bought a whole bunch more stuff today... mostly as gifts to bring back home. But eek! I'm spending hundreds of dollars this week already..... gotta limit what I'm spending money on the next few weeks or else I won't survive Taiwan!

Went to some clothing stores to see if they have nice stuff for 10,000 won or less. And then went to Uniqlo, and they got some really nice stuff for cheap prices (not to mention you get tax reward if you're a foreigner and spend more than 30,000 won in one transaction. Not a whole lot back, probably about 3,000 won or so, but it's still something). And then went to Aritaum, which is kind of like Sephora with limited brands, and got sold on IOPE moisturizing stuff. I think I'm buying wayyyyy too much stuff.

One thing to note though, their currency conversion at Myeong-Dong is much better than at the airport. Airport had a conversion rate of 1 USD: 1078 KRW, but Myeong-Dong was 1 USD: 1120 KRW. I read that on a blog before that the local currency exchange is always better than the bank or at the airport. With no service fee!

Alright, so I went to eat some street food and here are some pictures of the ones I tried:

Fishcake stuff. You spray on soysauce yourself (1,500 won)

Squid kabob (4,000 won):

18 cm high ice cream. The embarrassing story about this ice cream is that once they gave it to me, I was trying to take a picture of it with a lot of bags and stuff in my hand, and the ice cream fell to the floor. I went back and told them and asked if they can give me another one. They looked at me like "are you crazy lady? YOU dropped ice cream?" So they gave me a much shorter one and said in Chinese, "don't drop it again". It was really embarrassing. I've never EVER dropped ice cream before -_- (2,000 won)

I went to the LOTTE department store and....... found food paradise. WOW! The amount of desserts and food in there was incredible!

So there was a Pablo in LOTTE and I wanted to try the rare cheesecake... but they were out of the mini version, and there was no way I can finish eating the big one by myself (and it's 13,000 won). So I settled for a crepe cake instead.

It was pretty good.... but not exceptional.

Here is a picture of me trying to take selfie.

I also went to the Line store in Myeong-Dong (there are plenty of different Line stores, but I think this one is the flagship store). Mmmm.... everything is too expensive, so it's really a place for photo-op only.

Here are some interesting things that happened during shopping. First, I didn't know there was like a store dedicated to GD..... people were taking pictures with his life-size picture:

Quite a popular guy in Korea.

And then I saw Park Bo Gum's picture outside this cosmetics store and I just wanted to take some pictures....

And got sucked into the store by the associates. The lady was not really nice and was kind of like "so you like Park Bo Gum, but do you know what cosmetics he's supporting? blah blah blah..." I'm just thinking to myself..... I like this actor, but I'm not fanatic about him! I just took a picture of him because I thought it was interesting! Lady! Anyways.... the stuff was too expensive, so I exited out of there.

At Watsons, there is also a bunch of cosmetic stuff. I remembered Watsons in Taiwan being more of a household item store that specialized in more beauty care stuff at times, but really they sell everything. In Korea, it seems like it's just mainly cosmetic stuff. So here are some thing I found interesting:

Their hair dye features celebrities. This is Girls Day, but I think just the idea of using celebrities to advertise (they do that EVERYWHERE) makes more sense. In the U.S., celebrities' faces are almost never linked to MANY products at once (if any), and their only job is to sing or act, but not to advertise products. Somehow doing it the Korean way (or really, asian way), it seems to bring more unity to the country (?) because everyone is pretty much looking at the same people all the time. Bleh, I don't think I'm coherent enough to articulate..

And cute Line characters are on a lot of stuff.... this one is to remove blackheads. So cute! Cony became prettier after she uses it :)

There are Daisos everywhere. I mean, everywhere. There were two stores across the street from each other. Is that necessary!?

And then.... socks. Pretty much all the sock vendors sell these cute socks for 1,000 won each pair. Not too bad. Got some Got7 socks for our Got4 group :p They only have four members... so I bought all four.

Final thought of the day: I don't really like being in places with a bunch of people. I am not as shameless as I think I am, so it's really hard for me to inconvenient people in pushing them around or asking for help (etc). It's quite hard to shop in asian places if you're not that type of people. I'd rather just be shopping in a more "clear cut" kind of place, like H&M or Uniqlo..... but you can't do that in asia if you want to shop with good prices. Blah. So Myeong-Dong was just a must-go-see place... but I really didn't enjoy being there as much as I did in Samcheong-Dong yesterday.

Cosmetic store employees follow you EVERYWHERE. Actually, a lot of the employees from other stores do that too. It's really annoying and weird. Seriously, they stand one step away from you as you browse and just keep following you everywhere. Eeek! Let me shop in peace!!

And last thought. Out of all the street food I tried today, the "oden" was the best. I think I just really like more traditional street food than any trendy stuff. The ice cream was quite tasteless. Neither really sweet or had any flavor. The squid was ok, not exceptional. Crepe cake was normal. But the oden was really worth the price. I would totally go back and get some more. I think sometimes "trendy" just means overpriced and too creative for their own good.

Alright, school starts tomorrow and I gotta get ready for bed now that I have SOOOOO much more moisturizing steps to do, getting ready for bed and getting ready in the morning is gonna take much longer -_-.