Literally. I have no idea why, but for some reason, Korea doesn’t dig their sewer system very deep. This place smells worse than NYC on the hottest day of a heat wave! Seriously, every time we walk outside of our apartment building, I gag at the smell in the air. It constantly smells like raw sewage. I don’t know how people can stand to be outside? And there are always neighborhood children playing in between the apartment buildings, where it smells worst.
Add the sewers to that the fact that apparently no one has ever heard of dumpsters here, and you have one stinky situation. Seriously, we don’t put our garbage in a dumpster; we walk it down to this big pile off to the side of one of the buildings. Then it is guaranteed that within 15 minutes one of the ah-jee –mas will be ripping the garbage bag open, and digging through it. Koreans think Americans are very wasteful, and throw out too much. Which maybe be true, but really, anything that’s in our garbage is just that- garbage. So, ah-jee-ma will go through and dig out whatever. I think they may be taking out recyclables, and biodegradable food scraps for fertilizers, but I’m not positive. In the evenings, you’ll see children walking to the trash pile with a tray full of the left over scraps from their family’s dinner. They just throw the scraps right onto the pile. I don’t understand how this culture hasn’t managed to wipe itself out with the bubonic plague yet!
Also, the place smells very…Asian? You have the smells from the market in the air, combined with the vinegary smells of kimchi (spicy pickled cabbage), plus the smells from the foods the people cook and eat. If you’ve ever been in an Asian market in the states, like the Assi Mart, the worst smelling aisle is pretty much what it smells like here. I’m sure I’ll get used to the smells, and won’t even notice them after a while, but for right now, gag, this place stinks!
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