Suh-Bees-Uh!

One of the best things about shopping and dining in Korea is the SUH-BEES-UH, free "service" items, that you get just for shopping at a store or eating at a restaurant. For starters, every traditional Korean meal comes with a table full of "service" food. When we go out for BBQ, as we do once a week or so, we can expect to receive about 6-8 free dishes with our meal. Usually, they are different types of kimchi-ish vegetable dishes, but sometimes we'll be surprised with free soups, a bowl full of egg or a bottle of "cider" (Korean 7 Up). The side dishes are what usually makes or breaks a restaurant for us. We can get BBQ anywhere here, but a place with good sides can expect repeat business from this blogger and his girl.

Sometimes the grocery stores will offer 1+1 deals with a free roll of paper towel taped to a bag of chicken nuggets, or something like that, but by far the best places to get some free swag are the cosmetic shops. Cosmetics shops in busy areas will actually give you free stuff just to go inside and look in their store- you don't even need to buy anything. Anyway, a perfect example of this, today it was really hot and it was time for us to pick up some sunscreen for the summer. We each got a tube, mine from Skin Food, Mel's from Missha:

Total price: less than $20 (yes, I bought broccoli sun cream)

And here's the free stuff we walked away with: an acai berry mask, lettuce and cucumber water drop essence (wtf?), grapefruit body wash, "super aqua" refreshing cleansing foam, BB cream, "sun milk", aqua youth cream, night repair serum (2 packs), "turn over control booster", and night repair lotion. Also, at the Missha (where I didn't even buy anything), the saleslady took one look at me, said "남자" and tossed in a 2-pack of whitening lotion. Should I want to go the Michael Jackson route with my look.

And that's not all, Mel was also given a glass tissue box at Missha. We were going biking and she didn't want to carry it around, so she just left it on a payphone for someone else to find... but really! A glass tissue box. Anyway, we don't even shop at these places all that often and we have a drawer full of free samples from our time here. Anyone out there need some essence of lettuce cream? Some "sun milk"? If you don't take this stuff off my hands, some Seocho hobo is gonna have some really fancy looking skin after they dig through our garbage when we leave.