Seomun Market Day!

So yes...Yesterday was pretty awesome sauce!

We got to sleep in yesterday..which was nice considering I didn't feel so good when I woke up that morning. I wasn't gonna let a little sickness keep me from going shopping through! We had planned to go to Seomun Market by ourselves. Remember the market we went to on the Subway Tour? Plus, it's just some silly allergies trying to put me down. We decided that we would just lay around till 10:30 or so and then start getting ready. I don't actually remember what time we left and neither does Andrew but we think it was around 11:30.

We sat in our car for a little bit trying to figure out how to put the address in our new English/Korean GPS. Finally we got it put in and off we went. Before we could get off base, Andrew saw someone he knew and we pulled over to talk. Well, him and Andrew talked about work and stuff. Andrew said this dude (Charlie) has absolutely no reason to work cause he inherited lots of money from a relative, but still chooses to and puts a lot of pride in doing a great job.

After they got done talking we left the base and headed toward Seomun Market. After holding on to the car door handle holder (tightly I might add) for an awesome 10 minutes or so, we finally reached our destination. One little problem though...where to park. On the GPS there is a button for finding parking and we punched it in. It started by taking us right down the middle of the market and it looked like on the screen that it was going to take us in a circle. In the middle of the market the traffic was going major slow and I thought we'd never reach the parking lot. But then we saw a lady out in the road trying to wave people into this small little contraption. We didn't know for sure that this was parking and Andrew use the app on my phone for translation. She told us yes...and to push 4 when we got inside.

It was the strangest thing ever .. a elevator for a car!...but we made it out alive. I heard no sound coming from it either...Even when you get in an regular evaluator there's usually noise coming from it.

Any who...we made it to the top and parked. But then we didn't know where we went to go down. Luckily there were people up there with us and I told Andrew we should follow them.

So we went down some stairs into department looking place that had tons and tons of clothes and shoes and jewelry and stuff. We were getting hungry at this moment and our main goal was to find food, but I was getting distracted with all the pretty things around. We finally made it out onto the street where you would could see a lot of little eateries in the middle of the street. We decided we'd try one of them out. The ladies that cooked the food came up to us and realized we didn't speak Korean so we use our app once again. Andrew put, anything... just not spicy.

 This is what it looked like in front of us:

That orange stuff is kimchi..the silver pot to the left of it was our water that we didn't drink :)..they had some peppers out and some sauce that you use with your food.

Story was up for the experience!

I wish I would have took a picture of the food. We had a noodle type meal in a soup type liquid with some kind of leaf and other dark black seeds in it. Story was all about it...she LOVED it. The two ladies sitting next to us taught us who to use the chopsticks with the noodles. There were still people stopping on the street to watch us eat. Later the lady cooking asked us if we would like some of what the ladies beside us was having and we declined..but she bought it to us anyways! It was some kind of dumplings in the same soup liquid. As we were almost done eating a young Korean dude came over and told us the owners wanted to know how the food was. We told him great! We also wanted him to ask them how much. He came back to us and said that they wanted to give it to us for free...but Please come back! It was so sweet, and when we got done..we told her thank you in Korean and that we would definitely be back!

After we left, I saw a shop for Traditional Korean Dresses for little girls. Last time we came to the Seomun market and Andrew and I agreed that before we left Korea..the girls would be getting one of those. We decided to stop just to see how much they were and ended up with getting both the girls one. Once we found which ones we wanted for the girls a lady figured out with size they would need. Mackey got a 6 (age) and Story got a 3.

Here's Mackey posing

It was so funny..the shop owners told her to do the peace sign!

The whole time we were in the shop people were stopping by the window store fronts looking in (if you look at the picture the windows were to the left). Some even came in and asked if they could take pictures of them. It's like the girls are celebrities here! I have more pictures of the girls in their dresses that I will put at the end of the post.

After we left that shop we worked down the street back to the dress shop where we got Story's dress last time. It was a little hard finding it cause there are so many streets and alley full of vendors. Finally we found were we ate the donut thing last time and knew it was to the right of it. I wanted to get Mackey a dress since we got Story one last time.

Mackey's Pretty Dress

Side note: Andrew was thinking about the parking and wondering why we didn't see a lot of others parking there also...he joked around and said "We might have a million won bill after this for parking!"

After that we found a little place off to the side that served these little pancake things with cinnamon in them..they were delicious!

I also took a little video of the market for no reason other than I wanted to video it :)

While Andrew and the girls finished their "pancake". I stopped over to a store nearby and picked out some gloves...

not bad for 2,000 won

After we ate  our little dessert that only cost us 2,000 won for two...we decided that we would go get some fruit from one of the vendors before we left. We decided on some strawberries and grape tomatoes..I think we gave 3,000 won for the strawberries and 5,000 won for the tomatoes..which is better than buying at the commissary:

 We then headed back to car...in the department store..up 4 floors and into our car..one problem..how to we get down..do we go in the way we came up? Luckily there was another car trying to leave and he went down the way we came up..THANK YOU! Before we went down...Andrew and I didn't know where we needed to pay. A man came out and Andrew got out of the car and asked him how much. The man told him in Korean which Andrew didn't understand so the guy took some money out of the register and showed him. It was only 2,500 won!! What a steal for almost 3 hours of parking! I guess they don't want to charge much since everybody around here walks everywhere.

Well, when we got home we all (not Andrew) took a well needed nap. That was pretty much all to the day other than Andrew went outside to the playground with the girls.

Here are some pictures of the girls in their new dresses!

Hope everyone has a wonderful Sunday!

God Bless

The Brands