Day 266: Midnight Shopping

Ahhhh Friday...another week gone by. Besides our Thursday Dinner/Game Night with Michael, Addie, and Katie, my other weekly tradition is Friday TV Night with Sally & Jason. After work every Friday we race home just in time to watch The Apprentice, which is then followed by Survivor. Those two very short hours of television is something we look forward to *all week!* There's not a lot of good TV here, and I can never figure out when stuff is on (TV shows seem to start and end at random times here, shows rarely begin on the hour or half hour unless it's on AFN.) The three of us really do love our reality TV and those two shows back-to-back is the creme-de-la-creme of it! It's fun and social and just the perfect way to unwind after the week. I'm far too tired to go out on the town on Friday nights so this little tradition suits me perfectly.

After our TV shows we decided to go and do a little grocery shopping at Wal-Mart. The Wal-Mart here in Ilsan, strangely enough, is actually open 24 hours a day. I can't imagine what Korean family would be shopping at Wally World on a Wednesday night at like 3am, but hey, at least the option's there! The store was fairly empty when we were there and it was actually quite pleasant for shopping. Most days you can barely even navigate your cart safely down the aisle without mowing down at least three elderly ajimas on the way to grab that last can of imported dill pickles.

Once again, the idea of a 24 hours grocery store baffles me. It makes me think of travelling in the States actually. Between Vancouver and Seattle are all these GIANT grocery supermegahuge food stores that are not only open 24/7 but located way out in the middle of nowhere. These stores are the size of small cities and NEVER close! What's up with that? Grocery stores in Canada close at midnight so seeing these always perplexed me. Doesn't the store lose money staying open so long? Who goes shopping for food in the wee hours of the morning? And why are they always way out far from populated urban centres? We'd be driving at night in the pitch black of the forest on I-5 and suddenly see a glow on the horizon. That glow would always turn out to be one of these strange shopping anomalies and my friends and I would always get a kick out of visiting them, just because we could. Buying Keebler cookies and other fun random American treats at 2:30am in Hicksville, Washington was always a good time. And now I can continue that here in Ilsan if I choose, although Korean suburbia is certainly far removed from being in the pitch black middle of nowhere America... Weird, but fun. :-)