The first few days upon your arrival to Korea as an expat are a barrage
of new ideas and concepts, some of which take months to fully
understand in context.

One of the more notable ones for me was how differently Koreans view
the concept of "trash disposal."

Lester Aswhepe, who has been in Korea the longest of anyone I know,
took me and the rest of the Ahssa! staff around Unyoung Dong our first
few days here. We were on our way back from local the TopPoint to get
international calling cards to call back home with when he finished his
Coke, reflected upon it for a moment and said, "Do you know what a
Korean trash can is?"

He proceeded to fling said Coke can into the air, no trashcan in sight.
Shelton, Coy and me just looked at him in disbelief. We soon realized
that there are, like, virtually no public trashcans anywhere in Korea.

Now, in the States we would think this was shockingly rude behavior.
The idea that such behavior would be acceptable in Korea would at first
made you think that, well, Koreans are filthy in public places compared
to Americans.

Wrong.

They're not filthy, they're actually much cleaner than Americans (at
least on an individual level.) It's just rather than have public
trashcans, they have old dudes that run around (usually in the middle
of the night or early morning) who pick up all the trash and make
things look nice.

This way, old dudes have jobs and public places are clean.

See, Korea makes sense (sometimes) if you look at the world from their
point of view.

Oh, as an aside -- one day the Ahssa! staff were hanging out, watching
AFN when a PSA came on that showed a peice of trash next to a trashcan
and no one was taking the time to pick it up. We all found this a hoot
because well, in Korea there wouldn't be a trashcan there in the first
place for anyone to put the trash in to begin with.

I guess you had to be there.