Moving Day!

Not mine, but it was someone's moving day in Osan today. This is just an awesome piece of Korean random information, and it is entitled to its very own blog entry.

Today is Korea's Independence Day and a national holiday. I was invited to a fellow Canadians place for a magnificent breakfast of pancakes, fruit salad, maple syrup and some hometown coffee. This is one thing Korea does not do, breakfast. I miss the greasy spoon joints that were so much a part of my life at home. I can make it all at home in my kitchen, but it just doesn't taste the same as my eggs ordered over easy, home fries, brown toast, sausages & bottomless coffee, usually for in and around 5 bucks. I digress. Moving Day. So on the way to my friends this morning for breakfast, I stumbled upon 2 moving day operations. In Korea everyone lives in shoebox housing complexes. These are massive high rise apartment buildings and almost all of them have glassed in balconies. The purpose of these balconies is mostly for moving.  A moving truck here is not only one that can carry all your junk from A to B, but also one with a retractable arm and a platform. It zips (literally zips, they're so quick!) to the top, the doors slide open, load 'em up and back down it zips to the truck, whether you're on the 2nd floor or the 52nd floor.  No taking doors off hinges, unscrewing banisters, jamming things through stair wells (yelling "PIVOT!", hahahaha), cramming things into elevators, scratching walls, chipping paint, and the last resort of sawing things in half in a desperate attempt of removal. Having been through a combination of some or all of these things during one move or another, I can definitely say Korea has it right. Once your belongings are safely down and transfered from the platform to the bed of the truck, you just need to get to your next destination and repeat process in the opposite order. Brilliant, I think the rest of the world could learn from this process.