It's the Little Things

    When you travel to a new country, you often think about the big differences. Things like differences in technology, social etiquette, architecture, climate, and physical appearances. But you hardly ever think about the little things. For instance, before traveling to South Korea it never occurred to me that other countries might have different outlets. I just assumed the outlets used in the U.S. were universal. Small differences like these enforce the fact that you're in a completely different part of the world. Things standard in one's homeland turn out to not be as common in other places. For me, this was especially apparent with restrooms and trash bins.

   In South Korea, most businesses either have restrooms located in different parts of the building or none at all. This is a high contrast to the U.S. where it is standard for pretty much every business to have a restroom in a convenient location. It's kind of hard to take pictures of a lack of something but here are a few pictures of places where you would expect there to be restrooms.

  Here are a couple of pictures showing the lack of trash bins. The pictures show that there are not any trash bins for at least a few streets.

    This is the view of Seoul from Seoul Tower. While up there, someone joked that in this entire view there were probably only 5 bathrooms.

   This post probably exaggerated the lack of garbage bins and restrooms so just to clarify, South Korea has enough of the two, just not as many as one from the U.S. might be used to. To finish off, here's a cool pic of what I thought to be a well-designed bathroom on Nami Island.

- Global Navigator (Luis Quesada)