My feet and the Gobi Desert

For those of you that know me, I'm a generally clean person. I'm not really about being dirty and grimy unless I'm camping. Then it's ok. I keep my apartment clean, my dog is clean, and I pride myself on never wearing wrinkled clothes or leaving my apartment looking like a homeless person. I guess you could say I'm a completely anal retentive neat freak. And that is fiiiine with me.

That point being made, I've noticed something about myself since I've arrived in Korea. No matter what I do, or where I go, how many times I shower, scrub, and buff, my feet are always insanely dirty. Every night when I come home from work there's a black film on the bottom of my feet. I have a chalk buffer in my shower, and every night I soak that baby up with soap and scrub my feet until they're raw. I go to bed every night with shiny and soft feet, and come home every night looking like I've been running barefoot through a war zone.

I cannot comprehend this. Is Korea just SO dirty that it just settles all over the place? Even when I wear shoes, the feet are black. I don't get it. It got so bad that even after scrubbing there seemed to be a permanent layer of black on my little tootsies. So I got an even more hardcore scrubber.

Going along the theme of dirt, another aspect of Korea has revealved itself. Every year, around this time, dust is blown down from the Gobi Desert. Apparently the deforestation in China is so bad, that now there's this monstrous desert, and the whopping winds from Russia pick up the dust and sand and dirt and grime, and blow it down our way. The result is this fine orange dust. It settles on EVERYTHING. I woke up Sunday morning to a cloudy sky. Only it wasn't cloud cloudy, it was "I live in a dirty polluted shithole" cloudy. The sky was gray, hazy, and really made me want to use a face mask. And as the day wore on, you could see this dust all over cars and signs and the like. Apparently it gets worse, and when you're walking some days you can just inhale, and then feel little grimy particles of dust and sand in your mouth. I can't wait for THAT.

Dirty feet and now a dusty mouth...