Korea Culture Now 
Every English guide to jwibulnori (쥐불놀이) files it in the same drawer: a folk ritual performed on the first full moon of the lunar year, when farmers burned the edges of their rice paddies to drive out rats and pests. That is where the game comes from. It is not what it was when I … Read more
In our guide to the Ara Waterway at Gyeyang Bridge, we followed the canal path where Korea’s cross-country bike route begins. Keep going a little further along that same waterway and you reach a place even fewer outsiders know about — a wetland park where a wooden boardwalk winds through tall reeds and dense trees, … Read more
When Squid Game opened its first episode with hundreds of players sprinting across a field while a giant doll chanted, then froze them with a single glance, the world met a Korean childhood game for the first time. Strip away the deadly stakes and that game is something every Korean grew up playing in schoolyards … Read more
If you follow Korea’s most famous long-distance cycling route from the very beginning, this is where it starts. The Ara Cycleway runs dead straight along a canal from the Yellow Sea all the way to the Han River in Seoul — and the stretch around Gyeyang Bridge, just a short walk from Gyeyang Station, is … Read more
Malttukbakgi (말뚝박기) is the Korean schoolyard game where one team bends over in a line and the other team runs and jumps on top of them. If that sounds less like a game and more like an accident waiting to happen, you have understood it correctly. It was also, for boys of my generation, one … Read more
If you search for how to play paengi chigi, almost every guide shows you the same scene: a child on frozen ground in winter, striking a wooden top with a small whip to keep it spinning. That version is real, and it is old. It is also not the game I played. I grew up … Read more
Imagine a single elementary school classroom in a small Korean town. One boy runs it — not the teacher, but a twelve-year-old class monitor who has quietly turned forty children into his subjects. He collects tribute, rewards loyalty, punishes dissent, and rigs the system so completely that the adults never notice. Then a new student … Read more
Most visitors to Songdo never look up. They come for Central Park, ride the paddle boats, take a few photos of the skyline, and leave. But one of the best free views in the entire Incheon area sits on the 33rd floor of an office building most tourists walk right past — the twisted, notch-cut … Read more
Every guide that explains how to play yutnori gets the rules right and the game wrong. The rules take about four minutes to learn. Four wooden sticks, a board of twenty-nine stations, four pieces per side, first side to bring all four home wins. That is genuinely all of it. What the rules do not … Read more
Stand on the low hill above Cheongna Camping Park at sunset and you’ll see something that shouldn’t quite make sense: rows of family tents glowing in the evening light, a Costco sign, an elevated highway, and a wall of gleaming apartment towers on the horizon — all at once. It looks like a campsite that … Read more