Costco!

A couple of months ago when I heard that Costco would not only be coming to Busan, but that it would also be parking itself a mere 15-minute walk from my doorstep, I think I peed my pants a teeny bit in excitement. For those of you back home who have never lived in Korea (or in Asia, for that matter), you have no idea what this means. It means cereal. It means cheese. It means a whole lot of things you simply can't find anywhere else (without it costing an obscene amount of money). I've been counting down the days until Costco opened its glorious doors... and today was the day, people.

And Ken and I made the huge mistake of showing up on opening day.

Ken managed to snap this picture with his hand phone while we were battling our way through the crowd and, believe it or not, it doesn't nearly capture the chaos we experienced. Living in a densely populated country, you get used to shoulder-to-shoulder crowds in every shopping center. But today Costco was full of shoulder-to-shoulder, elbow-to-stomach, shopping cart-to-shin kinds of crowds.

After spending 30 minutes sitting in a traffic jam in the parking garage, and spending another 40 minutes pushing and shoving our way through the front door and down a few aisles, we finally found a few things we wanted to buy and then managed to head over to the checkout line which was, within and of itself, a monstrosity. Every line had about 30 to 40 carts crammed into it (and when I say crammed I mean crammed, as the concept of forming a line in this country has yet to be grasped). We decided that after all of the waiting and pushing we had to do to get the stuff we wanted, we might as well wait in line for a little while longer to ensure that our time and nerves were not wasted entirely. However, after waiting in line for a few minutes, we realized we forgot to pick up our membership cards at the front office; a bit of a necessity when it comes to shopping at Costco. So I held down the fort in line as Ken made a mad dash to the front of the store to claim our cards. To make a long story short, the line at the membership counter was just as chaotic as the checkout lines, and we were therefore unable to purchase anything. So after spending 15 minutes trying to ditch the items we could no longer buy and another 20 minutes trying to get back out of the parking garage (yet another traffic jam), we were finally free from the chaos and had successfully wasted an entire evening.

Costco, I'm glad you're here, but I don't think I'll be paying you another visit for a long, long time.