In Europe, people putting trash bin inside a kitchen cabinet. A massive culture shock I still can’t get over, seriously.

I love to travel to new places and constantly getting bombarded by new experiences and cultures. And thank God for AirBnb, nowadays people can travel for less and experience staying/living in a local people’s home. As I noticed, Europeans love their kitchen cabinets. It is also very often that I see apartments hiding huge appliances like fridge, washing machine or dryer inside their kitchen cabinets. I personally think it’s a genius. It’s less cluttered and aesthetically pleasing.

Until……. I saw I saw this. Trash bins inside a cabinet. In my mind, it was simply screaming, “But why???”. I know for sure that EU has quite a regulation for separating their trash into different categories for recycling purposes, but putting them inside a cabinet is another level of mind blown to me. Perhaps because in my mind, putting something inside a cabinet makes it seem like you are keeping it more than chucking it away. Growing up in Indonesia and Singapore, I can say that I never know anyone who puts their trash bins inside any cabinet. And because here we don’t separate the trash, most of them tend to smell quite bad and so, the idea of this gave me a shock for some time.

It still amuses me to this day thinking about it. It’s the weird small thing like this that makes me love traveling.

EDIT: Thank you for all the comments. I guess a lot of people are more confused with me being ‘culturally shocked’ by where people put their bins than I am. Just to answer some, where I’m from, we normally place the bins beside the cabinet on the bare ground floor. Basically anywhere that is very much obvious to anyone. A lot of homes have their below part of the sink exposed too, and that is where they put the bins. Just as an example, this is my kitchen sink and that is where the bin is. (Not the prettiest one for sure, we don’t do much cooking) But this is a very common set up in here.