Supermarkets in Korea

Going to the supermarket here in Korea is quite an experience.  To put it bluntly, it's a sensory over load.  Supermarket employees stand in the aisles shouting out the discounts of the day and the items for sales (with microphones), while t.v. screens strategically placed in aisles blast the same obnoxious commercial over and over.

                      Buy this discount fruit or I will talk even louder into this microphone

I remember one time bending over to look at an item and when I came back up having a extra large bag of Vienna sausages about one millimeter from my face.  "Buy this!" the grocery store worker told me.   Anyone remember that Chris Farley movie Black Sheep? 

          
           Vote for Donnely!

I always do my shopping late at night about an hour before the store closes to avoid all the craziness.  Anyway, I took some photos of some interesting food items at my local supermarket E-Mart the other night. Enjoy.

                               Canned snails

                                                   Canned silkworm larvae

Koreans love ramen noodles.  The ramen noodle aisles here are insanely huge!  The next few pictures are just part of one aisle. 

                               Ramen

                               and more ramen

Right before I left France for Korea, one of my wife's co-workers took us out for a nice lunch at a local restaurant.  My wife's co-worker and her mother asked us what kind of food Korean people eat.  I mentioned sushi and squid.  My wife's co-worker's mother shuddered and said, "Je ne croix pas qu'ils les mangent"! (I can' believe they eat that), while she dug into a plate of snails.

Koreans love squid and eat it as a snack all the time.  Buttered and peanut butter squid is popular at the movies and at baseball games.

   Squid stand

                               More squid