Day 20 - Laundry Day and Story Time!

Today, I went through the usual grind of classes and then ate some of those buckwheat soba noodles for lunch.

I decided to do my laundry today, which is always an arduous process because the dryers in the laundry room are terrible and take 2-3 cycles to actually dry your clothes. So I spent a few hours doing laundry and watched a movie, Artificial Intelligence, while I was doing it.

I then took a nap, which was a mistake because it made me stay up way too late and I was tired the next morning!

Halfway through my tuna kimbap (with kimchi and radish of course)

For dinner, I met up with some friends and went to get kimbap (김밥), which is Korean sushi. I got tuna kimbap, which did not have pieces of tuna like I expected but like StarKist style canned tuna. It was really strange but actually tasted pretty good! Also, it was only 3,000 won for 8 big rolls, which is a pretty excellent price for sushi.

Since I don't have much to talk about for this day, I'll tell some stories of experiences I've had that haven't made it into blog posts.

Blue Eyes

I had a really interesting experience on one of my first days in Seoul. I was walking around with all of the other study abroad students and we were eating street food and a Korean guy who was about the same age as us came up to us on the street and started talking to us. While we were conversing, he stopped mid-sentence and exclaimed, "You have blue eyes!" He told me that he had never seen someone with blue eyes before in real life, because "all Koreans have brown or black eyes" as he told me. He then asked if he could take a picture with me to which I gladly obliged. It was a pretty surreal experience!

Trash Cans

One thing no one tells you about Korea is that there are no trashcans anywhere! They are incredibly difficult to find and it isn't unusual to carry trash around for an hour until you get lucky and find one. I researched it and the reason for this is because of the way garbage systems are organized in Seoul. Instead of paying for a garbage pickup service, you have to buy special garbage bags for the area you live in (which are quite expensive, replacing the cost of paying for the garbage service). As a result, there are almost no public trash cans except for the ones put up by the city government because people would come by and dump their personal trash into them to avoid having to purchase the expensive garbage bags. What makes this even more strange is that although there are no garbage cans, there isn't any litter either! Trash does accumulate sometimes but there is a very efficient public cleaning system that goes out at night and cleans up the city.

P.S. There is a place on the Yonsei campus where you can see 5 trash cans from one spot. It's like the holy land of trash cans.

--- That's all for now!