Saturday, September 15, 2007

Tour les Jours Bakery: Fro Ad ;)

Okay, I was heading home last night and got off the bus at the Tour Les Jours bakery near my home. I looked and saw a cute ad with a nappy in it.

Thanks CJ! CJ is one of the big companies here in South Korea, and I like CJ for some reason. They own the Tour Les Jours chain.

Koreans, black folks and bread. It's cute, so I'm sharing.


Forgive the Perez inspired picture comments, but, at least, I didn't copy him completely. I mean I annotated in pink after all.

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8 comments:

  1. you know it , I love bread , those chocolate covered doughnuts with the pictures of people dancing on the bag, powdered doughnuts, cinammon chip bread, jhallah bread(probably spelled it wrong) hey I live in the batisserie in germany. I learned german just to order a cake and some pastry...now that is sad heheheh

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  2. I can't say I LOVE bread, but I really like it.

    Bread here in Korea still has a way to go. Often it's sugary, greasy or just badly done. You'll get strange breads with sliced hotdogs and ketchup on top touted as a mini-pizza. Um, not quite...try again.

    You can get good bread but it's usually not at the chain bakeries. I found a great Australian chain that does organic bread recently at my favorite department store here. You have to go to the department stores for the good stuff and hope that it trickles down to the masses who buy at a lower price point.

    In fact, my favorite department store has a Le Cordon Bleu counter - THAT place is heaven. It's not really heaven for breads, but it is for the great dishes they have there.

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  3. wow, Le Cordon Bleu..I can imagine ..So what department stores do they have there? Is it like Walmart or like a Winn Dixie or HEB?

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  4. To answer your question they have about 3 or 4 upscale department store chains: Shinsagae, Lotte, Hyundai, and Galleria. Those are like upscale department stores in major cities everywhere. Of course, they have their Korean-specific twists but they're not all that different.

    I don't even think of stores like WalMart and Target as department stores as much as big discount megastores. Anyway, the stores I named are not Walmarts. Their "Walmarts" are E-mart, owned by the Shinsagae group, and Lotte Mart. I would say the one type of store they don't have is the grocery supermarket. The E-marts and Lotte Marts usually have one level that's all food like the big grocery supermarkets back home but go up or down a level and you'll have housewares, clothes, music, etc.

    This is me venting (be warned) -

    Now this is me (I'll admit that much), but I don't get how people think Korea (well, South Korea) is like living in the backwoods.

    I had a friend try to tell me I'd not be able to find cheese here because "the Chinese" don't like cheese. Well, Koreans aren't the Chinese and Costco has stocked American brand cheap ass cheese blocks since I moved here years ago. Now I can even buy fine European cheeses from a few different sources.

    The South Korean economy has been on the upswing for years. That's even in spite of the Asian finaicial crisis as Korea was the first country to settle its IMF debt.

    Again, this isn't directed at you personally, but I do get comments like "oh, come back to the West for better medical treatment." When the fact is, at least, here it's closer to universal healthcare than it is in the States. As an insulin dependent diabetic I KNOW how prohibitively expensive medical care can be in the US without insurance. The healthcare issue is one where I really have to stop and think when it comes time to decide whether to stay or go. Thus far, Korea has won on that point.

    Anyway, rant mode off, I know you just asked a simple question. But really, the upscale department stores here are just like going to Macy's or Nordstroms back home.

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  5. Jane, I've lived in the U.K. for seven years now, and I swear that when I read 'nappy,' I thought 'diaper.' I looked in vain for a diaper for about, oh, three seconds, then it hit. Duh. Okay -- you've been warned. Say 'nappy' to mean 'Afro' in the U.K., and EVERYBODY will be confused, black or white.
    As for bread in Korea, I will never forget the two-hour walk I made with a few other expatriates in Seoul, two years before the Olympics. We'd been in Korea for weeks and craved something like a donut or a roll. We finally ended up in a place with a British flag on the window and got ourselves one of those soggy, sugary, ketchup-y things. I didn't quite cry, but I was pretty close. Given how tasty Korean food is, it just doesn't make sense that they haven't quite mastered the art of baked goods... Oh well. They'd probably think my kimchee was crap.

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  6. Yes, I know about the UK definition of nappy ;-)

    But as I'm a black American woman I'm using it in the culturally loaded sense that I've been burdened with.

    The bread issue is still an "issue" here. It's getting better. In fact, I just bought a loaf of bread from the Sticky Fingers counter at Shinsagae tonight. This is simply because the Korean-made bread is too sugary, too badly made and just isn't healthy bread. Sticky Fingers is organic, vegan bread that's healthy.

    I'm still very much a believer in while in Korea eat Korean food. If I eat foreign food, I'll eat it as a restaurant where the cook is foreign. That's not to say that Koreans can't or won't adapt but I do find Korean interpretations of certain foods to still be tragic. That Shanghai Deli I go to has Chinese in the kitchen doing the cooking ;-) However, in all fairness, there are other restaurants where Koreans have been trained or have been abroad and make wonderful dishes of all sorts. I'm just still leery after having a few too many bad experiences.

    Basically, as the economy develops further and more people come and go Koreans can and are learning.

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  7. In Korea, this makes sense. In the U.K., this would mean eating meat and two veg every day of my life. Fortunately, here we have Indian and Chinese food -- after a fashion.

    I want all my consumed calories to be quality calories, and Chinese food prepared for British -- (or Japanese) -- tastes, just isn't the real thing. If I'm going to have Chinese food, I'll check to make sure the people eating it are Chinese, preferably Chinese- speaking too. Otherwise, it is just a waste of money and what I think of as disappointing calories. Sadly, even quasi-Korean food isn't on offer here yet. So if I want Korean food, I have to make it myself.

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  8. The English are so backwards!

    LOL.

    ZenKimchi has a few good receipes. Since I live here and don't live with a Korean, I'll just buy Korean food rather than prep it myself ;)

    I think MaryEats does too. Those are both linked on my sidebar.

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Hey there! Thanks for visiting my blog. It's my first blog, and I'm glad folks are still stopping by even though I'm no longer living in South Korea. Feel free to comment. If you want a personal answer, leave your email, and I won't publish the comment. Nasty comments and spam links will not be tolerated.