🔥tourists, empty cups, and why Korea has so few trash bins

A whole row of empty cups lined up on a wall shelf by a walking path. The man who lives at the bottom of that path spotted it coming home with his dog, and he blamed tourists.

The Korean comments were brutal. "They only know how to eat, not how to throw away." "They see one or two cups there and decide it's the collection point." My favorite: "At this point the guy who left one empty cup looks pretty to me." Here's the context that makes this happen everywhere in Seoul. We have very few public trash bins on the street. A lot of them disappeared years ago after the pay-per-bag trash system came in, because people started dumping household garbage in them. So if you buy a drink on a walk, you either carry it until you find a convenience store or a subway station, or you do what these people did. I'm a carry-it-back person, mostly because I grew up being yelled at by my mom. When I visited Japan I was surprised it's the same there, almost no bins, and people just take their trash home without thinking about it. In Korea we're halfway: no bins, but not everyone got the carry-it-home memo. Honestly one cup is an accident, two is a sign, and thirty is a museum. I'd rather the city put back a few bins near walking paths than keep pretending everyone will behave.