Yogurt ladies

So there are these brown bags that one sees hanging on doors.

This is across the street from Tek's daycare.

This one is actually on a door inside our apartment entryway, on the first floor.

Here's a close-up:

The URL is www.yakult.co.kr

There is also this lady who is always walking back and forth in the neighborhood pushing a cart. We see her often on the way to daycare in the morning.

Notice the bag hanging from her cart?

We gradually came to the realization that there is an extremely vibrant yogurt-delivery service here. One morning I caught the yogurt lady in action.

Putting yogurt into the brown bag ...

... and flipping it over to the inside of the gate.

The carts don't seem to be motorized, but I think they have some sort of gearing mechanism that makes them extremely easy to push around.

Once we became aware of these yogurt ladies (and they are all ladies), we started noticing them everywhere. They all wear the same distinctive pink jackets. And they are not just out in the mornings; I see them any time of day when I walk around outside. Sometimes the ladies stop in and chat with customers.

Each lady is responsible for a pretty small neighborhood patch of just a few square blocks. Yet somehow an army of them is kept busy all day long. There must be dozens in Gyeongju. It's hard to fathom how much yogurt must be being delivered each day in the city to keep all these yogurt ladies employed full time.

Two yogurt ladies on the same street at the same time.

Yogurt cart "parked" at our apartment complex while yogurt lady makes deliveries.

We've gotten friendly with the one that we see almost daily on the way to daycare. She occasionally slips Tek a little yogurt drink. She also makes sizable yogurt deliveries weekly to his daycare.

A few weeks ago I was watching a New York Times Fashion & Style video featuring the hip Hongdae 홍대 neighborhood in Seoul. And what do you know -- there's a yogurt lady cart going by during an on-the-street interview with a fashionable young student! Check out the video yourself, between 1:25 and 1:33.

This is what I think of as the prototypical Yakult product, a small sweet and sour yogurty drink, just 65ml, for kids.

According to the Wikipedia page, it originates in Japan. But if you go the Korean web site, you'll see they have a fancy line of other products as well, with more sophisticated branding and a marketing pitch related to healthy living. At Tek's daycare, the kind they drink is 7even. (We get charged extra for it based on his consumption.)