Some Ingenious Ideas. South Korean design & inventions
South Korean design and inventions
As a Westerner, after one month in South Korea, things already seemed a mismatch of the ingenuous and the illogical. One minute you will been blown away and pleasantly surprised by something and then, an hour later you will see or experience something which to a Western mind, is peculiar or plain odd. It is probably true to say that as a Westerner, there 
is no reason to suggest that the Western style of doing things or thinking is the correct way. The observations below are simply my observations according to what I have become used to in the Western world and from my travels.
You walk into an apartment and the first thing you have to do is take your shoes off and after two years here, the habit is likely to follow me back to Europe. Tramping around outside with your boots on and spreading the dirt inside one’s house surely is not a hygienic way to live, like us Westerns do. The Korean idea of no shoes definitely seems to make a lot of sense. Once you get into an apartment, you are quite likely to then be pleasantly surprised by the delightful way in which the heating works. Under floor heating in Korean apartments seems like a very sensible thing and I will miss it when I leave Korea. Thirty minutes after putting the heating on, you can usually turn it off and the room will stay warm for hours. Just like the under-soil heating which some English Premier League football clubs use for their football pitches, the heating involves hot water pipes under the floor/soil, which have hot water pumped through them and the heat created rises. In England, central heating with vertical units now seems so impractical. Heat rises. Surely the Korean style floor heating is a better idea.
