Engagement Photos and Costco

This weekend, we had an engagement photo shoot scheduled with Kristen, a photographer who has been a teacher here for about a year and a half. Her cousin, Marie, is a friend of ours and suggested we talk to her. I wanted to have our engagement photos in Korea as a kind of memento of our time here. I want people to be able to recognize that we're in Korea, so we decided to go to Cheongju, where Kristen lives, because there's a beautiful fortress on the mountain there. It's about 2.5 hours away from Daegu, and we left on Saturday morning at 11am. We meant to leave at 10am, but that bus was full by the time we got to the station. We got to take one of the luxury buses to Cheongju like we did to Andong. It was fantastic, again! The US really needs to get on board with this. On the way there, the weather got steadily more gray. By the time we got there, it was spitting rain. It continued to be gray, foggy, and rainy all day! Fortunately, we spent a few hours at the fortress taking pictures with it and the beautiful fall foliage before the fog got so bad you couldn't even see the trees anymore! It was insane, but very cool. The foggy pictures actually had a cool effect. After our shoot, we got lunch/dinner with Kristen at an Indian place, and it was delicious.We took a few pictures in the downtown area just to show off a little bit of Korea at night. We also got the fried dough in the shape of fish with cream inside. We had previously only tried the red bean kind. The cream ones were good though. We headed back to the station and caught the last bus out of town. I think the pictures turned out very nicely. Kristen has already posted 3 online, and they look really nice.

On Sunday morning, I had a nice chat with my dad and my aunt while my mom cleaned the house, and Gianni and I talked to his friend, Caroline, also. We are much overdo with a skype call to some of our friends from home, so friends, if you're reading this, schedule something with us. In the afternoon, we went to Daegu Opera House to see Tannhauser, an opera by Wagner. The opera was a part of the Daegu Opera Festival that has been going on for the last month. The Opera House itself is a beautiful building. We got the cheapest tickets with a few of our friends, so we were sitting all the way in the top balcony at the front. We had to lean forward to see over the railing, so that was kind of a pain. The opera is German, and it was captioned in both Korean and, thankfully, English. It was a pretty boring opera though. I'm not sure if that was due to the staging of it or the play itself. One of the people in our group knows the opera, and she said this was a bit of a tamed down version. It is supposed to start with an orgy or something, and it definitely did not. Anyway, there wasn't a lot of action or movement happening. The visuals were interesting, but the sets didn't  change during the acts. It was minimalist sets and staging with a kind of boring plot, so it made it even more boring. Oh well! First time seeing opera on a live stage was a bust, but it's ok. Outside the Opera House, there were all these booths set up where you could take pictures and experience opera. One of them was a stage you could take pictures on, and there was another where you could try on costumes. It was kind of interesting.

The Opera:

The Opera House, which is actually really close to where we do taekwondo, is already half way to Costco. My phone said it was only like 2 miles away from Costco actually. Being that we were so close, I decided for both of us that we needed to go there. We hopped on a very convenient bus from right outside the Opera House. I was probably the most excited person ever to enter a Costco! You actually have to take the rampscalator down 2 floors from the entrance door to get to the second shopping floor, then if you want to get to the food area, you have to take it back up one floor. It's kind of annoying. Otherwise, it's the same as at home, including a lot of the same food!
It was lovely! There were so many people, too! So we walked all around Costco, getting the things that are more difficult to get here. We got a huge pumpkin pie for only $8, some snack foods and cereal brands from home, the Costco muffins that are my favorite, crusty onion bread, Einstein's Bagels, and Heinz Ketchup. Probably the best discovery was the cheese section though! They actually had real, less processed cheese. I got a huge cheddar cheese block, ricotta to make lasagna, and feta! I'm sooooooo happy with all my purchases. We had too much stuff to carry on our own, so we ended up getting a taxi back to the apartment, and it only cost us $15! What a deal! I'm ecstatic. I needed a little something from home, and now I have it! :)