Okay, I never had to do that before.

Some of this is gross. If you have a weak stomach, or don’t want to be disgusted, please just skip this post and read about something else.

After a few times noticing this weird smell, I noticed that it had nothing to do with the toilet, but that every time I used the sink, I was smelling something weird… something akin to old, rotten spices, if that makes any sense. I started fiddling with the piping, took the pipes off the bottom of the sink and cleaned them. But they were already pretty clean, and the smell persisted. Finally, I removed the top bit of pipe, and with it the column that held the sink-stop in place. Guess what? There were mounds and mounds of old, slimy, mouldering hair in here. It was disgusting, but finally I got it all out, cleaned the pipe, and now my bathroom sink doesn’t stink. Which makes me happy.

What I don’t understand is why this was necessary. I never had to do that to a sink in any of my old apartments in Canada, even those with sink stops. Granted, I never had long hair, but in half those apartments I lived with someone who did have long hair; never did I encounter a case where the whole sink-stop column needed to be removed to be cleaned. It’s a mystery of engineering. As some of the people I know in Jeonju say with a smile, I can only attribute it to “Mysterious Asia!”

But anyway, there is a strange sense of having accomplished something, in having taken the thing apart and managed to put it back together. I wonder what is going to malfunction next…