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
Bupyeong Station Incheon sits above a shopping arcade so large that getting lost in it is not a beginner’s mistake — it is the normal experience, including for people who have used it for years. The numbers explain why. In 2014 the arcade was officially certified as having the most shops inside a single underground … Read more
Korean cafe culture has one detail that startles almost every foreign visitor within the first week: people leave their laptops on the table and walk away. Not tucked under a jacket. Open, unlocked, screen glowing, next to a phone and a wallet, while the owner goes to the bathroom two floors down. Nobody watches it. … Read more
Jjimjilbang etiquette confuses most first-time visitors, and the confusion usually starts at the front door — with your shoes. A jjimjilbang (찜질방) is not one room. It is two completely different spaces sold under one ticket, and almost every mistake foreign visitors make comes from not knowing which space they are standing in. One half … Read more
Korean convenience stores are not the same category of business as convenience stores in most countries. They are closer to a combination of a small grocer, a fast food counter, a cafe, a parcel office, and a place people genuinely eat meals — often at a counter by the window, at two in the morning. … Read more
Korean apartment noise complaints have their own name here — cheunggan soeum (층간소음), literally “between-floor noise” — along with a government hotline, a legal decibel standard, and a long history of disputes that escalated badly. It is one of the most persistent sources of conflict in Korean residential life. If you are living in a … Read more
Korean restaurant etiquette involves a handful of conventions that nobody explains, because everyone here grew up with them. Most of them are the opposite of what you would expect coming from a Western restaurant, and getting them wrong tends to make visitors more cautious than they need to be. The Side Dishes Are Free, and … Read more
If you have searched for the Sonagi film and come away confused, there is a good reason. Hwang Sun-won’s short story has been adapted twice for the screen, and both adaptations carry the same English title: The Shower. The story itself circulates in English under three different names. Almost nothing lines up. Here is what … Read more
The Korean games in Squid Game are all real. Not one of them was invented for the show. Ddakji, jegichagi, gonggi, spinning tops — Korean children have played all of these for generations, and some of us were still playing them in schoolyards in the 1990s. What English-language explainers usually get wrong is not the … Read more