Kimjang is the Korean tradition of making a whole winter’s supply of kimchi in one go, usually in late November or early December. For generations, it was one of the biggest events in a Korean household’s year. Relatives gathered, neighbors helped each other, and dozens or even hundreds of heads of napa cabbage were salted, … Read more
Pepero Day falls on November 11, and if you are in Korea in early November, you cannot miss it. Convenience stores stack towers of gift boxes by the door. Schoolchildren carry paper bags full of chocolate-dipped biscuit sticks. Couples exchange boxes tied with ribbons, and office workers leave a few packs on a coworker’s desk. … Read more
Suneung is the one day a year when an entire country rearranges itself around a single exam. Planes stop taking off. Offices open an hour late. The stock market waits. Police officers on motorbikes race late students to their test sites, and younger students stand outside school gates in the cold, cheering for seniors they … Read more
Learning how to play ddakji takes about two minutes. Getting good at it takes a whole childhood. Ddakji (딱지) is the Korean paper tile game where you slam your own folded tile onto the ground and try to flip your opponent’s tile over. Most people outside Korea met it in the opening episode of Squid … Read more
The Jangsu-dong ginkgo tree has been standing at the edge of what is now Incheon for about 800 years. It was already old when the villages around it were still farmland, and it is still here now that a highway runs past its hillside and a giant city park sits across the road. In autumn, … Read more
Incheon Grand Park is the place almost every kid in Incheon has been walked to at least once, lunchbox in hand, while a teacher counts heads at the gate. For me it was more than once. Whenever my school, and later my church, needed somewhere green and big enough for a few hundred people to … Read more
Jayu Park (자유공원) is the hill I think of whenever someone asks me what old Incheon was like. It covers the whole of Eungbongsan (응봉산), a low hill rising behind Incheon Station and Chinatown, and from the top you look straight out over the port, the cranes, and the open water of the Yellow Sea. … Read more
Most articles about Korean childhood games list the games. This one is about where the equipment came from, because that turns out to explain more. I grew up in Incheon in the 1980s and 90s. Looking back at what we played, the games sort cleanly into three groups — and the sorting has nothing to … Read more
What is a goshiwon? A room, usually just large enough for a single bed and a desk, rented by the month with no deposit and no contract negotiation. You pay, you move in, and you can leave without months of notice. For anyone who has read our guide to monthly rent in Korea, the appeal … Read more
Monthly rent in Korea works on a system most newcomers have never encountered: you hand over a large lump sum before you move in, and you get it back when you leave. The monthly payment sits on top of that. This arrangement is called wolse (월세), and it is what most foreign residents in Korea … Read more