Yesterday Amber and I went to Costco, which if you were wondering, yes we do have those in the U.S. and its pretty much just a giant wholesale club like BJ's or Sam's Club. Like many stores in Korea, they are on multiple levels connected by flat-ramp escalators that bring you and your cart to the next level... the neat thing is that your cart has magnets on it, which connect to the ramp so that it doesn't move and then when you reach the end, the lip of the escalator separates the magnets from the ramp. That was a really neat thing when I first saw it.
The items that Costco sells are pretty much the same as in the States except for one interesting thing that I saw. They had small, kid-like cookbooks that were geared for certain types of "name-brand" ingredients. So one of the books was all kinds of recipes for Land-o-Lakes butter; another was for Dole Pineapple; and a third one was Quaker Oatmeal. This was pretty neat, but was not as interesting as the food court area.
So to order food in the food court, you went to one window and ordered and paid for your food; the lady then gave you a receipt that you took to the next window where you got your food... in our case we ordered a pizza, brought the receipt over, and in less than 60 seconds got our pizza. This was the relatively normal part of the food court... the more interesting thing was that the area uses "real" silverware instead of plastic, and that they had large bins filled with onions. The bins had hand cranks and you would watch almost every Korean customer fill a plate full of onions and then cover it with ketchup, mustard, or both, and then sit there and eat it... so people would eat a full plate of only onions, mustard, and ketchup... I have never seen anything like that and it wasn't just a few people, it was most of them.
It was just something that was so odd, yet fascinating to watch. I wish that I had taken my camera.
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