The Fourth Day

Josh:
Finally we reach an end to the long posts with day number four.

Day four (Thursday): Not much happened today. I stayed at home, cleaned a little, discovered that PC rooms are not only open at night, blogged a little, did laundry without a dryer for the first time and picked up Audrey.

With that out of the way, another interesting thing about Korea is the garbage situation. They don't have public trashcans nor do they have building trash cans. As far as I understand, you are supposed to buy specific trash bags and set them on the street at certain times to be picked up. Since we don't understand Korean it is almost impossible for us to do this so I found some baskets on the street that seemed to be for garbage of different types, sorted out what we had, looked around and dumped it all in and then proceeded to run home. I wasn't sure if what I was doing was wrong because these were, after all, trash bag type objects on the side of the road with signs on how to sort out the garbage. I can only guess it is for restaurants or something but I figured I would be safe and make the drop quickly.

Another rant is about the love of individual packaging in Korea. Anything you buy, whether they be cookies or crackers, comes individually wrapped for the most part. Does everyone know the standard size saltine cracker bag? I purchased three different boxes of that size with crackers in them hoping to get a nice snack at home. When I opened them at my house I found that all of them either had two or three small bags of crackers. While I do love the convenience of individual wrapping for work purposes, if they just stuffed the box like us Americans then they could fit so many more crackers in each box. I can't help but feel ripped off to some degree. However, I can't really complain as those boxes cost me $.50.

Finally, one other interesting thing happened to me today. I was walking out in the morning to find a PC room and I saw another foreigner walking! I took a double take and he smiled and said, "Hi," to which I replied, "Hello," and we both walked off smiling. It's amazing how a tiny little interaction and a knowing smile between the two of us could make me feel so happy.

With that, I leave everyone so I can get some food and blood flowing through my legs.

Note that I am now on my fifth day. If anything interesting other than typing for hours happens today, I will be sure to update.
-Josh