Candyland

The best way to find coffee in Korea is to walk in a straight line for five minutes. Choose one of the twenty coffee shops you’ve passed. The same applies for fried chicken, premium baked goods, internet cafes, noraebang karaoke bars, or cosmetic shops. If you’re in a shopping hot-spot, those numbers double and triple. This is the land of the five-story Starbucks shop, home of the brave. Cafes bordering bakeries bordering specialty single-origin tea shoppes. Dunkin Donuts competing with Krispy Kreme, Paris Baguette fighting Paris Croissant.

Bakeries carry goods you've never dreamed of.

Sheet cakes don’t exist here, and apart from your kid’s birthday parties, no one misses them. What you’ll find instead are carefully sculpted towers of brownies, mortared together by delicate crème and raspberries. Cakes where fruit takes center stage rather than a supporting role, baskets of strawberries and kiwi lovingly wrapped in light crust. Bread from another planet, culinary machinations driven by spinach, smoked gouda, cranberries, figs, or gold flakes.

All kinds of good drinks too. This isn’t an advertisement for Korea’s food game, but it’s well beyond anything back in Pittsburgh. It’s cheap. Aforementioned bread with all the fixins is ₩2,500. Blueberry lattes with shreds of fruit in the purple foam are four bucks.  Ice-cream filled mochi with actual matcha powder are two bucks a pop. Individually wrapped opulence. The pendulum swings both ways though, fifths of whiskey for a hundred bucks a pop. Cask strength Johnny Walker Blue for three months of pay. Bath towels will run you $20 starting. Protein powder for eighty bucks a pound. The harmony found between five dollar dinners and fifty dollar bedsheets is loud, popping like a Victrola’s needle.