Day 94: Shopping Spree

God did I ever spend a fortune today!!!

I woke up this morning and there was absolutely nothing in my cupboard at all to eat, so I went and bought a big load of groceries. After work today I decided to go and drop off some film as I now had five rolls waiting to get developed! Last week I had noticed that at the giant E-Mart department store at Bucheon Station there was a Fuji Film Centre that did one hour photo, so that's where I headed to. I dropped off my film and had an hour to kill so I wandered around the department store just browsing away.

I then found myself on the floor that has a grocery store. Well I'm always up for exploring a new grocery store cause you just never know what treats you'll discover there! And man did I ever hit the jackpot here!!! I found so many treats that I just haven't been able to find in my own local neighbourhood - I bought bagels and cream cheese, peanut butter, butter-flavoured microwave popcorn, Western-style brown baked beans, and then I came across the best discovery yet to date...

I was just aimlessly wandering through the crowded aisles and came across the alcohol section (yes, you can buy booze in grocery stores in Korea!) and there I saw it, like a mirage in the desert teasing my disbelieving eyes... HOOCH!!! For those of you who are yet to be enlightened, Hooch is a type of cooler, a sparkling fruity alcoholic drink that comes in a variety of flavours and is really really yummy! The reason why I am so partial to Hooch is more for sentimental reasons actually, rather than taste-preference. The first time I ever got drunk was on Hooch while in London on a high school trip way back in March of '96! It became my beverage of choice on that trip, and it spawned a whole cult culture amongst my trip peers and all my friends back home. I fell in love with the drink, and my friend Lisa became obsessed with it too even though she wasn't on the trip!

Hooch even spawned a whole comic book series that Lisa and I created, where we were both super heroes (Super Scotty and Lightning Lisa) and we used Hooch Power to fight the forces of evil. We even later developed a comic series called The Paris Chronicles where Lisa and I are trying to make our way to Paris but keep running into evil bad guys along the way (mainly in the way of one hated teacher who we turned into a character called Leatherpants - yes he wore them to school for real.) In the comic we discovered that by smashing a bottle of Hooch a portal would open up and we could jump back (and forward) into time and travel to distant lands to escape, and further destroy, the evils that Leatherpants sought to reap upon the Earth. (Yes, I was a big geek back in high school and had way too much spare time on my hands!!! LOL!!)

Anyways seeing the bottles of Hooch on the shelves brought me on a virtual trip down memory lane, and since I haven't drank any Hooch in years and years, I bought a couple bottles to enjoy at home. Needless to say I was quite excited about this unexpected find in the grocery store!!!

I finished my shopping and went up and retrieved my film. It cost me $60 CDN to get them all deleveoped - OUCH - but it was well worth it. The pictures turned out great and I was really excited to get them back! What's even cooler is that I was able to get all five rolls put onto CD-ROM also, so that I can share them with all my friends and family! What I hope to do is to upload all the pictures onto a website that allows you to display photos and write captions for them, so that everyone who's interested in seeing them can check them out at their own leisure. I have no idea what websites do this (for free, that don't involve signing up for some account like you have to do with Yahoo, and that's really easy to use for people who are dumb with computers like me!) If anyone has any websites they can reccommend to me that are good for this sort of stuff, please let me know! I really wanna share all my photos with everyone! The sooner you let me know, the sooner I can start sharing all these great photos of me in Asia!