Cosco

Tonight, another teacher and I went to a members only Sam's Club-type-place called Cosco (I think they have them in certain regions of the U.S.). It's nice because many grocery stores here do not carry brands I'm used to back home, but Cosco carries some American staples (only the packaging is in Korean). I was able to stock up on things like dill pickles (that's right, I bought a years supply), peanut butter, jelly, PREGO (yep), cereal, etc... very exciting. They also carry very interesting Korean things, like big vats of dried seaweed, octopus legs, hot pepper paste, and weird flat fish. I saw them in an aquarium outside of a restaurant here and they looked dead. They are normal looking fish, but they rest on the bottom of the aquarium and lay on their sides. Anyway, I've digressed...
I can finally bring my own lunches to school, as I've been eating a free kindergarten lunch at school. Sometimes it's questionable... most of it is home-style Korean cooking, so there are things like chewy squid, kimchi (the spicy pickled cabbage), dried fish, tofu and rice (you can count on that with every meal). There is always at least one unidentifiable thing too...and no one (not even the Korean teachers) knows what it is. However, sometimes you'll get an American surprise, like chicken or fish nuggets. Soup is served with every lunch, and that is usually pretty good...it will have a semi-spicy flavorful broth, and then cabbage or bean sprouts in it. So I eat a lot of rice and soup for lunch. Thanks to Cosco, now I can make PB&J!
Because everything is so big at Cosco, Kristin and I had to take a cab home (she lives across the street) with all of our purchases instead of the subway. Cabs are pretty cheap here anyway. I have my address written down in Korean to show the cab driver, but because we don't know our way around the city, we really have no idea whether he's taking us the "long" way or not. If he is, we couldn't really do anything about it anyway, since we can't communicate with him! C'est la vie...