Korean Job Discussion Forums

[haute 4 teacher]

So I've been here for 4 months, and it still smells weird. In the classroom, on the street, in my own apartment.

At what point do you stop noticing the smells?

Do you?

Please say yes!

[fortysixyou]

Can you describe the smells?

Is it all one smell or three different smells?


When I came to Korea, I thought that it always smelled like car exhaust outside. As it turns out, there are a lot of cars here, and correspondingly, a lot of exhaust.

I stopped noticing it eventually, but the smell still annoys me.

[haute 4 teacher]

Well, there is a fish and pork factory across from the school, so I understand that.

But, walking around anywhere in town I can maybe go 4-8 minutes without something attacking my olfactory senses. Kind of like garbage and rotting (sewers maybe?).

And, walking past most restaurants, there is 3-6 different smells that I may encounter which aren't necessarily bad but largely unappetizing.

The larvae things cooking, I recognize that smell. Ditto with mothballs and urine (why do they do that with the mothballs, I'd rather smell just urine).

I'm just wondering if one gets used to it, you know, like when you were growing up and went to visit a friend and the house had that "other people's house smell" which you eventually stopped noticing after a while.

[fortysixyou]

Yeah, I'd say those are just Korean city smells...and you eventually get used to them. Sometimes they may even make you hungry.

I'm also a very smell-conscious person. In my apartment there is a strange sewage smell underneath my kitchen sink. I fight this smell with a cup of vinegar, seems to do the trick. Only now my kitchen smells like vinegar. Better than sewage, I guess?

[RJjr]

I think the OP is referring to the sewer smell that permeates the whole city of Seoul. I stopped noticing it around three or so months in, although I could still smell it if I was over a drainage grill. I think the locals can too, because I've seen pieces of wood and rubber placed over some of them. After five months of living in the rural mountains of east Tennessee, when I was in Seoul a week or so ago, I couldn't smell it like I could when I got there the first time in 2006.

Keep in mind, though, that we smell to them. Even though I can't relate to the folks where Koreans won't sit beside them on the subway or the folks who get turned down at the red light districts, I did have a Korean coworker who just would not believe me when I told her I spend a half hour in the shower every morning. She says she hates foreigners and I wonder if that's why. And there was even a lady teacher who posted just yesterday about getting a warning from her boss because the students say she smells.

In short, we smell Korea but Korea smells us too.

[keysbottles]

Each month when I go to the hospital to get my meds refilled, I will be the only person in the waiting room and the next Korean to come in will set next to me. Does this mean I smell like a Korean???

[sojourner1]

What you say is really how it is. It is very smelly and polluted. Not to down Korea, it really is the honest truth that sewer stench and pollution makes for there to be no air to breath in the low laying areas between mountains where people live.

I never stop noticing smells.

[Matt_22]

[nautilus]

[isthisreally]

I think the biggest problem here is that it's not just one or a bunch of constant smells. It's smells in different places at different times. I was in India before I came to Korea and India really stinks. But i got used to it a lot faster than Korea. India stinks everywhere. Whereas Korea is more like certain restaurants, sewers and my students.

[bijjy]

In Japan they don't puke in the streets; in fact, public drinking is prohibited. They don't eat bundeggi and old ladies don't sit around in the street doing things to piles of cabbage. They also don't ferment the cabbage in large pots outside. In Japan, the sewage systems are closed and built according to first world code, and there are many little gardens and trees lining the streets that purify the air. The neighbourhood trash systems don't involve piling up garbage 4 ft high on the side of the street without a container. I think all those things would explain the difference in smell.

[kimcheechochy]

Yes the smells.....welcome to Asia.

Korea definitely is an olfactory bonanza. When I first came to Seoul, I noticed that I could smell sh*t. I dunno what it is about the sewers here (maybe they are shallow) but the human waste smell is common around here, even in the fancy areas like Apgujung.

But hell, even NYC smells like garbage (so I have been told).

[bijjy]

Welcome to asia? No, I don't think all of asia stinks! Japan didn't stink, Thailand didn't stink, and even the non-touristy more polluted parts of Malaysia didn't stink like Korea. I hear Beijing stinks from the factory emissions but I've never been to verify.

[kimcheechochy]

I don't know about Japan but..

THAILAND DOESN'T SMELL? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I was in Phuket (arguably the nicest place in Thailand) and it stunk there too. There were a lot of sick dogs walking around Phuket as well. Probably Vietnam was the worst I think. There were HUGE piles of garbage in the street, uncovered.

[igotthisguitar]

It is the pollution, Korea's poor air quality.

Clearly cleaner air in the west, especially the country regions.

CHEMTRAIL SPRAYING might have something to do with it as well

i see to sense the Chinese Hwang-sa a lot.

Likely has something to do with the so-called ELECTRO-SMOG (form of radiation poisoning )
as well.

Even now, as i sit here typing, there arises the periodic compulsion to put my mask on.

Particles per million must be quite dense