Get to know the locals: Korean life hacks you wish you knew before
Hello everyone!
Living abroad you can't help but admire some of the customs in your host country, and I feel that especially Koreans are very creative people who have come up with an endless repertoir of unconventional but practical ideas. Some of them are definitely applicable out of Korea, so get you pen and paper ready to take notes ^__~
1. Using scissors for cooking
This one is pretty obvious and if you have ever been in Korea, you probably already saw it yourself: Scissors are like the kings of the kitchen utensil world in Korea. Cutting your food, such as 냉면 (cold noodles), 딱한마리 (thick chicken brooth soup with chicken pieces) or everyone's favorite 삼겹살 (typical meat for BBQ) with a pair of scissors during the cooking process is completely normal and socially accepted. Meanwhile, I still have my mom's never-ending preachings ringing in my ears, telling me not to use ANY. POINTY. ITEMS. in her bowls or frypans long before I could even grab a pair of scissors or bring it anywhere close to food. Seeing how in Korea everyone uses scissors for these kind of cooking jobs regularly made me grin thriumphant over my mom.
2. Freezing your organic trash
Continuing the food-theme, this one really impressed me when I first saw it because EVERYTHING MADE SO MUCH SENSE. For comparisment, at the apartment house in Germany where I spent my childhood, we had big waste containers installed in the courts (I should attach a photo because it sounds terrible but our complex was extremely old-school and green and lovely), so you could take out your food waste any time and the garbage collection would pick it up once or twice a week. No bother here, since anything that could rot or smell was stored outside. Living in Japan though, there is designated trash days so you will have to store your garbage inside the house somewhere. Unfortunately, Tokyo has a little - big - problem with Indian cockroaches in summer. They are considered "wild" as they live outdoors and they are extremely large and can fly. There is 100,000 and one ways for them to get into your house, be it through your air condition duct or slits below your door, etc. My boss in Japan lived in a top-notch apartment complex in central Tokyo with perfect view on Tokyo Tower and Tokyo Sky Tree, concierge and own gym inside the complex, but even he had these kind of cockroaches inside his apartment sometimes. They would just be carried into the 40th floor by unfortunate windstreams. This being said, cockroaches are everywhere and you really don't want to have any food waste inside your house. NOW, when I first came to Korea I was generally a bit scared of summer and similiar things happening as in Japan. Turns out that Koreans put the little yellow bags for organic trash inside the freezer and fill them up there! Once the bag is full and the next food trash day has come, they conveniently throw the garbage out and the garbage collection will take them away. In some areas, you are allowed to throw your organic trash any day and time you want, but obviously you might not always want to waste a garbage bag for 1-2 scratches of food, so by storing the bags inside your freezer you can keep everything cool, odor-free and hygienic. GENIUS!
3. Isolate your windows and walls with bubble wrap
So, this one is a bit unique and sounds weird, but if you think about it it makes perfect sense. Some older Korean houses have very bad isolation, especially for the windows. Even if there is double windows, since it's mostly the sliding type, windows don't really seem to close as tightly as they do close in - for example - Germany. To improve isolation, you can use a sheet of thick bubble wrap and stick or glue it onto your window frames. Sounds very MacGyver-ish to you? Well, apparently this must be quite a popular method, since even DAISO (the dollar store brand) is selling sheets of this special type of bubble wrap every winter! Apart from the see-through, clear type bubble wrap, there is also bubble wrap enforced wall paper, in case your walls are paper thin and you want to isolate them too. This method is still in use among people who live in 한옥 (Korean traditional houses). The interior is usually remodeled, but the walls of these houses are kept the way they are and don't provide any isolation whatsoever. In any case, sticking bubble wrap will obviously reduce the quality of the view outside drastically, but using this trick in your bathroom or bedroom (rooms in which you don't spend much time looking out of the window anyways) might save you a penny or two on heating costs in winter. For my part, I thought this was darn smart!
I am sure I discovered more of these before, but these are the only ones I can think of at the top of my head right now. What do you think about these life hacks? Have you ever heard of them or would you try them?