Yo!

In Korea, many people still sleep on the floor. If we didn't have two clunky beds taking up so much room, I think we would too. The floors are heated in winter, so it makes it very comfortable to pull up a mat and go to sleep. In summer, the floor is the coolest place in the apartment. It seems comfortable beds haven't made it to Korea yet.

I'm sure many of you have heard us complain about our terrible bed. It is downright uncomfortable. The springs in our mattress poke us at night, even though our beds are brand new. We set about remedying our situation this weekend. We went and purchased a yo. They are meant as floor beds, but we put ours on our bed for extra comfort. We walked to a bedroom store about 3 miles from our apartment. On our way, we stopped at Hi Mart so Michael could look for a mouse. Hi Mart is like the Best Buy of Korea. It has five floors and is jam-packed with electronics. Sending a nerdy boy like Michael in there was just like bringing a child to a candy store: he wanted to look at everything. He found a mouse he liked on his small budget. It was a small, red optical mouse for only 7,000 won. With the horrible won value these days, that's $6.

We kept walking and we saw lots of pretty flowers. Chuncheon is gorgeous in spring. It almost makes up for how frigid and barren it is in winter. Almost.

We made it to the store and they didn't have anything we liked. We were on a budget and the cover alone for the yo was going to cost us 50,000. So, we walked about a mile to Emart. When we got there, we were pretty hungry (it was about 3 pm or so and we hadn't had lunch), so we stopped at the food court. Here all of the big mega stores have food courts. There is a display case with a bunch of fake food and you pick out with one you want. Then you give the number to the cashier and she sends the order to the booth were they make the food. With the exception of the ordering counter, the food courts are very similar to the US. You choose from Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or "Western" food. We choose Japanese, and for $6, we got this set.

A bowl of rice, some daikon radish slices, cabbage salad with kiwi dressing, corn salad, donkatsu, and a Japanese noodle soup. Michael ate the pork cutlet and rice and I had the soup. We shared the rest. It was pretty good for fast food. Very salty though.

Emart had some affordable yos, but the selection was poor. We had to choose between a few very flowery, very girly designs. They all looked like they were made for a six year old. I looked around, but I couldn't find any replacement colors that were not pink and girly. We choose the purple flowery one. It goes well with our flowered wallpaper.