My little women and me

Yesterday we did a bunch of shopping for Autumn before she heads home with Chris in a couple of days.  In Korea, there are underground malls built around subway stations. Lilly, upon being introduced to this, said "it's like a subway station that turned into a mall!  Who wouldn't love this???" Daegu also has a large amount of specialty streets.  Jewelry alley.  Cosmetic alley. Second hand shops alley. Fusion food alley.  Dukbeoggi alley. It's pretty amazing.  Our plan was to start at the second hand alley and then head to the underground shopping area but the insane amount of rain shortened our thrifting experience.  Their thrift stores are cheap and full of adorable clothes as Koreans generally have a really cute style.  Autumn found plenty tshirts with badly translated English on them, which are hilarious but not really something I want to spend money on. Sorry, Autumn.  There are now more Kangs that have fanny packs (agh!!) although they wear them a little differently here. They wear them as cross body bags with the bag right up front. It's a little cuter and makes everything easy to access.  We loaded Autumn up with the best writing utensil on the face of this earth. Mitsubishi gel pen, we honor you.  Adorable socks? We're on it.  I have a theory that school uniforms drive their cute sock industry.  There are cute socks everywhere, folks.  Everywhere.

         

While we were out shopping, Lilly and Elise were finishing up their sleepover with Yeju, which involved a trip to a Jimjilbang.  (Korean bath house and sauna, which I'm absolutely terrified of)  I think I'll have Lilly blog about the bath house as she had a great time and is young enough to not be phased by it.  Yeju's mom then started messaging me (her English skills are pretty minimal so we're all in Korean now) to arrange a meet up.  Here is how I roll: I read their message and decide what I think it means.  I then copy and paste into naver (a much more accurate version of google translate) to see how close I was.  Then I type up my reply, copy it back into naver to check it and then send it off if it makes sense. Where it gets tricky is if Chris' uncle also starts messaging me in the middle of it OR if they call me. Calling is so much harder.  A. It's loud everywhere so it's just hard to hear. B. I can't copy and paste our phone call in naver!  After lots of messaging and a rough phone call with Halmoni that ended much better than it started (she used some words I've NEVER heard before!), we were able to plan a meeting to go to the local science museum.  And I was able to arrange to have them pick up Chris and Hannah.  Success. I've found that I'm much more brave with my Korean without Chris there.  I have a hard time even mustering up the courage to try with him there.   So my Korean skillz should improve more after Chris flies home.  Theoretically.  We shall see.  But let me say this.  Korean is a hard language.  Learning to read it is the easy part. Between all of the many different levels of politeness and a sentence structure that is opposite ours, it can be hard to twist your brain around.