"Are you a garbage man?"
"Nah... but I hope to be one one day..."
- Family Ties
Garbage here is a pain in the proverbial butt... or, if you take a less selfish point of view, very sensible and efficient at cutting down on waste. :) EVERYTHING has to be recycled and ALL and ONLY food garbage has to be disposed of in its own bin. To make sure you actually do this, the rest of your garbage can only be thrown away in special pink bags that cost more than a normal garbage bag, so that you do your best not to fill them up fast. So once you've filled up five separate containers of different kinds of garbage in your apartment... you get together with your roommate to cart all the stuff downstairs and outside where you freeze your fingers off in the numbingly cold weather, sorting everything into the correct bins... of which there are like 70... it's quite confusing trying to figure out where different types of plastic or paper go, and a little Korean man comes and attempts to communicate to you that you're putting stuff in the wrong place or else just follows you around taking out things you put in and moving them... haha. I've heard he sometimes yells, but have yet to experience that. (I complimented him once on something he was wearing, and he said "ya, I found it in the garbage - picked it up on my rounds." Just kidding. He doesn't speak English, and I don't think he's an environmental artist either.) The food garbage is very smelly and gross and you have to make sure there's no plastic or anything mixed in with the food. (So, for example, if you had a container or bag of expired food, you couldn't just toss the whole container.) I must admit, it's a very good system for making people actually think about what they throw away. :)
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