One evening, Derek was taking out the trash. We were at the point in our stay in Korea that we knew that we weren't disposing our trash correctly, but didn't quite know the right way. We were still putting everything together in one bag. As Derek was walking down the street to the trash pile (our apartment building didn't have enough space around it to have an area for trash nearby), he noticed a couple of men standing near the trash, pointing and talking.
He knew immediately they were trash inspectors. They were there either because someone had complained about the "organization" of trash, or because they were trying to figure out a better place for the trash. Either way, it was a problem because Derek was carrying two bags of overflowing, "unorganized" trash. They had seen him so he couldn't turn back or try and walk past nonchalantly. So he decided the best thing to do was walk right up, throw the bags on the pile and hope they wouldn't notice anything.
It didn't work. Being foreigners, we were always scrutinized in everything we did. Throwing away trash was no different. The two men saw at once that Derek was throwing out bags that had food, paper, plastic, glass, AND cans (all of which should be separted)! The two men being older Koreans, didn't quite know what to do with a foreigner. Their English wasn't that great, and they had no idea that Derek was pretty proficient in Korean. They started gesturing and mouthing words convinced that Derek would eventually understand them and fix the problem.
After a confusing minute or two, Derek had enough of the weird game of charades, so he turned to them and in Korean said something like, "do you have no sound?" The English translation sounds pretty weird, but the two shocked Korean men understood immediately that Derek spoke at least some Korean so they tried to tell him what the problem was in Korean.
The problem with talking to many Koreans in Korean is that they don't simplify the language for foreigners. At least, they didn't for us. Derek did pretty well with Korean, but there's a lot he didn't understand.
Pretty soon, the three of them realized that they weren't really getting anywhere with gestures or Korean, so the two trash inspectors tried some English. What they came out with was "Don't waste, waste! Don't waste waste!" as they pointed to the trash bags Derek had just thrown. He took it to mean what he already suspected, separate your trash so that you don't waste the recyclable goods by contaminating them with the old food.
He smiled and said something like, "Ok, I'll do that next time." I guess the trash inspectors were pleased with that answer because the conversation ended there and we weren't fined for our trash violation! :D
PS: Here's another English teacher's experience with the Korean trash system.
:-) Cute memory! I am not very good at that - I guess I need to not waste waste too!
ReplyDelete