Off-the-beaten-path neighborhoods, local eats, and hidden travel spots across Korea — written from the ground up by a longtime Incheon resident, starting with Michuhol and expanding outward.
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
Wolmido Incheon is the place nearly every person in this city has been at least once — on a school trip, on a first date, or on an ordinary Saturday when there was nothing else to do. It is Incheon’s signature seaside strip: amusement rides, arcades, food stalls, and a waterfront promenade at the end … Read more
I grew up in this neighborhood, and Moraenae Market Incheon was just part of the landscape — the place my family went for produce, not a destination you’d plan a trip around. It’s only looking back that I realize how much that kind of ordinary familiarity is exactly what a market like this represents: not … Read more
Ask anyone who grew up in Incheon about a bowl of naengmyeon the size of a wash basin, and they’ll know exactly what you mean without needing an explanation. I ate at Hwapyeong-dong naengmyeon street myself, years ago now — the memory that’s stuck isn’t the taste so much as the sheer size of the … Read more
Sorae Port sits at the bottom edge of Incheon, where a tidal creek separates the city from Gyeonggi Province. It is a working fishing harbor with a large seafood market attached, and it draws enormous weekend crowds from across the metropolitan area. Here is the honest version: the fish market itself is not the reason … Read more
Dongincheon Station is not a place people plan to visit. It is a stop on Line 1 that most travelers pass through on the way to Chinatown, two stations further west. The area around it looks like what it is — a downtown that stopped being the downtown about forty years ago. What is easy … Read more
Most foreign visitors to Korea skip Incheon Chinatown for a simple reason: a Chinatown in Korea sounds redundant. If you have already seen the ones in San Francisco or London, why spend an hour on the subway for a smaller version? That logic misses what this place actually is. Incheon Chinatown is not an outpost … Read more
Sinpo International Market has a claim most Korean markets cannot make: two dishes that are now sold in every corner of the country were either invented here or made famous here. One of them was an accident. The other was a small shop’s idea that spread nationwide without anyone planning it. Neither is marked with … Read more