Upon moving to Korea, the first things I needed to procure were food and cigarettes. This was astonishingly simple even at 3am in the moderately small city of Jeonju. There are a gratuitous number of all night "Quik" stores that stock everthing a person, functioning soberly or drunkenly at 3 am, could need. Cigarettes and food are at the top of their inventory, along with alcohol (also sold around the clock).
Now, long before I started cooking for myself, I began to notice packaging of items purchased at the "Channel Q" mini-stop near my apartment. The wrappers and boxes themselves did not seem all that different, but what lay inside the packages and boxes did; more boxes and packages.
For instance, a box of "Lotte Chic-Choc" chocolate-chip cookies come six to a box. This may not seem odd, but they are the size of a normal "Chips-Ahoy" cookie and the box was roughly the same dimensions as a box of spaghetti. Upon opening the re-closeable, zipper-tear box I found each cookie individually wrapped in its own package, complete with nutritional information, "Chic-Choc" logo, and a bar code. This seemed extraneous, but little did i realize this would be the first of many encounters with superfluous packaging.