COEX Mall

I am so thankful for this blog! I am just bursting with Korea-love but it is currently 4:44am on the East Coast so no one is awake...thankfully I can write my heart out on here and describe my amazing day! Since today was very overcast and the view from Seoul Tower would not have been very good, Amy, James, and I headed off to COEX Mall in Seoul. This is a HUGE, VAST, underground mall - the largest shopping center in Seoul. It is definitely the largest mall I have ever been to. (PS Anyone who was subjected to Abeka Grammar & Composition can relate to this: I spent a good five minutes trying to figure out how NOT to end the last sentence of this paragraph with a preposition. I had to let it go because sometimes not ending sentences with a preposition, however grammatically correct, just sounds odd [ex. It is definitely the largest mall to which I have ever been...)


It is not just a typical, big mall though. COEX is extremely high-tech. For example there are flat screens everywhere with all kinds of advertisements. There are games projected down from the ceiling that you play by stepping on the ground.




There is a HUGE bookstore that actually had a fairly large selection of English books. I had to take this picture of Korean children sitting in the bookstore reading because it encouraged me after my depressing commentary earlier on online gaming (see previous post). Hurray for reading!



There were so many different places to eat ranging from McDonalds to Japanese to Korean to Italian to Chinese to Starbucks to American. We actually ate at an Italian restaurant. It was a somewhat bizarre experience....being in Korea - having GOOD (it was very good) Italian food cooked by and served by Koreans who barely spoke English. Little Side Note: You never tip in Korea. And there is no sales tax. Its kind of nice actually - you always pay exactly the price listed, no doing math in your head. For me, anytime I don't have to do math is a happy time.

So the mall was a blast, it was so much fun to walk through stores and see so many things I have never seen before. I realized that in America I get so used to the same stores and chains that I end up seeing the same brands and items over and over again. While this is also true in Korea, as a foreigner, EVERYTHING is new and it is so much fun to take it all in. I wanted to buy everything, particularly things for my neices and nephews but as this was my first time and everything was so new, I decided not to buy anything on this trip but to wait until I can be a more scrupulous consumer. I have a hunch that in the year to come a great deal of my hard-earned won will be spent at the vast, amazing, shoppers-dream-come-drue COEX Mall.