trash and treasure

This post is mainly to show you the layout of my apartment. It's basically a box with a kitchen, a bedroom, and a living room all wrapped up in one, with a bathroom/laundry room on the side. But Check it out...So I've been here in this apartment, this room, for about three weeks now, and its finally come to a point where I'm comfortable. When I moved in, it felt like the smallest place ever, and it was incredibly dirty. The first few nights I woke up with a sore throat, probably from dust inhalation. But anyways, I've added a few things and cleaned it up a little bit.

-one man's trash is another man's treasure-

So when I first entered the apartment, it was fairly empty. There was the table, the bed and the tv. Now, I'm not saying that I need stuff to live comfortably, but if there was a choice in having a furnished apartment, and not having one, I would definitely choose the former. In this next picture you'll see some of the highlighted items I got to make my apartment feel a bit more homey.

The desk, the little table, and the couches were picked up, not at a store (I don't make that much here!!), but on the side of the street. These pieces of furniture were garbage, probably being replaced by newer items.
Sprite's slogan "Image is nothing, thirst is everything... Obey your thirst"; I don't think that they showed that commercial over here, because image is definitely not nothing. I don't want to generalize the population and suggest that all Koreans are obsessed with their image, but in my experience it seems that the culture is geared towards the importance of people looking their best. For instance, there are mirrors scattered throughout the city, both little and big. I have seen maybe one in five people continue to walk past the mirror without checking themselves out and ensuring that they still look good. It's funny to see the amount of people looking into the back of their cell phones, trying to see if their hair is still good. Also, there's plastic surgery advertisements everywhere. It's not just the ad that's worth commenting about, but beneath these advertisements is a mirror. So people are to look into the mirror, judge themselves, and then look a little higher towards the model in the plastic surgery poster... disgusting.
Anyways, so as I took my newly acquired pieces of furniture home and washed them off outside (they were garbage after all), it was amazing the amount of dirty looks I got by people walking by. Maybe they were more confused looks rather than dirty ones... but it seemed that no one understood why I wouldn't just buy something new. I can understand how people who live here and have some extra money would rather buy new pieces for their home. But as for me, these stray pieces of furniture work out great. If I needed a new chair, and I didn't mind that someone sat in it before me, I'd have no problem finding it.
Although I understand the need to upgrade to newer stuff, it feels like such a waste to have so many perfectly good items sitting on the curbs. What can be done about this? While the Korean people turn the other way while walking past a dusty coffee table, the foreign English teachers visiting the country are thinking "Sweet! A new coffee table for my place!" Perhaps we just need more people who are unfamiliar with this culture of image.