Costco

Hyundae Beach in Busan

I spent this past weekend in Busan. It's a beautiful beach town, and after soaking up some rays all day Saturday and half of the day on Sunday, Danielle, Brian and I all decided to venture to Costco. Yes, there are two Costcos here in SoKo. One is near Seoul, and the other is right in Busan. Brian has a membership, so he was kind enough to let Danielle and I tag along.

As we jumped out of the taxi at the store front, that old familiar pre-bulk-shoping feeling whooshed over all of us, and we were off to what turned into a 2-hour consumer extravaganza. From the seemingly endless Costco style samples, to the massive packages of EVERYTHING (including many Western products) we all felt right at home. I stocked up mostly on vitamins, protein powder, emergency-C and peanut butter. I also bought some cheap bulk candy to use as prizes in my class.

After dawdling up and down every aisle, we headed to the checkout line, rung up all of our $400 worth of items, temporarily split the bill evenly, and headed to the food court where we were going to have lunch and figure out exactly how much each person owed. We finally found a table, sat down with the receipt, and realized that the entire foot and a half long paper trail was ALL in KOREAN.

To make a long story short, we spent nearly 40 minutes trying to figure out the identity of each item on the receipt and thus which person owed what monies. We used everything from a Korean-English dictionary on a persons iPhone to the item numbers located on each item, to just plain guessing in a few cases, but we were eventually successful, and then chowed down on foot long hot dogs and cheap raspberry Sundays. So buyers beware. When you group-shop at Costco in Busan, sub-total bill after each person or get ready for a crash course in how to read/understand Korean.