Korea Day 10: Lotte and visiting the office

In the morning, my friend and I decided to pay a visit to my local office to share a cup of coffee and talk about our trip so far.  We headed downtown and easily found our way to the office high-rise.  We sat and chatted around Korea.  They treated us to lunch, see the pictures below!

Banchan and Veggies

The Spread

The Spread

Doenjang

Kimchi Jigae

Naengmyun

After lunch we hit up the LOTTE department store...

The LOTTE Department store in downtown Seoul is ginormous.  There are actually three different buildings that make up "Lotte Town".  There is the Main Hall of LOTTE Department Store (14 floors, 3 basements), AVENUEL (Premium brands, 10 floors, 3 basements), and LOTTE young plaza (Youth Fashion, 7 floors, 1 basement).  A grand total of 31 floors and 7 basements, granted some of the basements are parking but still...huge is an understatement.

The images of USA department stores like Macy's, Nordstorm, and Sears may come to mind initially.  This is sort of what you would expect in Korea.  However, in Korea it seemed the actually floors of the store did not extend outwards as far as American department stores.  They had many floors instead of a few floors with a lot of square footage (or square meters).

Some floors in LOTTE would only feature one main brand or one style (i.e. Men's Outdoor, Young Casual, Watches & Jewelry).

My friend and I went to LOTTE for really only one store.  It wasn't even a Korean brand...it's Japanese.  The brand is MUJI and they make some pretty cool, simple but elegant things for the home and office.

After making our purchases (mainly notebooks) in the MUJI section, we wandered around the 'young plaza' building until we had had our fill of fashion.  In general, the merchandise was not cheap.  The prices were very similar to prices in American department stores.

I can't remember if we did anything eventful that evening...probably not :)

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