COSTCO

This weekend us girls made almost a 2 hour trek to Costco on the subway. We've been meaning to go to stock up on cheese since anything other than Kraft singles is basically obsolete in Korea except for Costco. We walked in and it hit me hard; I miss home. It's kind of silly to think a store, Costco of all places, would trigger such an emotion but it did. I love it here (Korea, not Costco... although Costco is pretty great) I really do and it's nothing more than the people that I miss. I just really miss them-- family and friends. I can handle the lack of food options, the awkward stares I get being a foreigner and the inability to communicate, but nothing compares to the people halfway across the world. But I've digressed... It looked identical to the ones back home except this one was two stories and had probably 5 times the amount of people in it. The layout was the same, the smell, the colors, the feel. It's the one thing Korea hadn't put it's cutesie flare on, which normally I don't mind all that much but don't fuck with Costco. We were so hungry from all the traveling that we went straight to the food court. It was the moment of truth. Was this really Costco? or just another SK knock off? Sure enough, the same items were on the menu with a couple of Korean twists of course. The menu included, pizza, hot dog & soda combo, smoothies, churro, iced lattes, ice cream, chicken bake, bulgogi bake and clam chowder?? I was so pumped that I couldn't make up my mind. I got a hot dog, slice of pizza and churro. I couldn't finish it all but it was so good. It tasted the same if not slightly better but maybe that's just because I'd gotten used to mediocre American-style food. After we ate we made the rounds aisle by aisle. Nothing really took my breath away until we hit the wall of cheese. Amongst the 5 of us, I'm pretty sure we purchased around 15 blocks of cheese. It took us so damn long to get there that we needed to make the trip worth it. We knew we weren't gonna want to come back anytime soon, if not ever. Of course there were samples. I was so full from the food court that I didn't really try anything except for the funny straws. Now that I think about it, I wish I had bought some. They were these plastic straws with chocolate bits in them. You use them when drinking milk and voila you have chocolate milk. I was really surprised that they had deli meat which is impossible to find here as well unless all you want is ham. My other purchases included prosciutto, salame, capicola, mortadella, turkey and feta cheese. For the first time in 4 months I had a non-sweet, Italian sub. It was incredible. As we rounded up our shopping I spotted these bad boys in the frozen foods section. It's always nice to see the familiar, even if it's a Dodger Dog. It was a good day.