Sullied Seoul

I honestly love living here. It's going to be hard to move back home, but sometimes, Seoul can be a very dirty place. My preconception of Asia led me to believe Korea would be a very clean, orderly place. The honest truth is that it can be quite dirty.

From Day Date Adventure 01

Nowon, the most densely populated area of the country (where we live) is often littered with fliers for various clubs and other "services rendered." The main reason it gets so dirty is that there are so many businesses in a small area, and each try to outdo each other with fliers and business cards. They pay people to stand in the street handing out this future litter. The compounding factor is that Seoul is the land of no trash cans. It's a serious hassle to find a trash can. often times, trash piles are used in place of trash cans. It's like a game of Katamari. What starts off as a lone cup, quickly becomes a pair, which becomes a small family of food containers that move into the cove of a closed business. The litter continues to propagate throughout the night, with people adding their own trash in a jenga-like fashion. As long as you are adding to an existing pile of trash, it's not littering, right?






















(above) This pile started off as an errant toothpick 4 hours ago.
(below) A look at the fliers and cards strewn about the street

From Miscellaneous

Amazingly, somehow in the middle of the night, the city hits the reset button and all seems to be perfectly clean and orderly....at least for a few hours.

From Seoul University Arts Festival