I’m Korean, I live on the south coast, and I write this site in English for people who are coming to Korea or are curious about it from wherever they are.
It started in August 2026 out of a specific irritation. Search “things to do in Seoul” and you get the same ten listicles, most of them written by someone who spent four days here, several of them quietly out of date. Search something more practical — how a bathhouse actually works, what happens at the airport tax refund desk, why nothing in the shop fits you — and the English internet mostly shrugs.
What I’m actually trying to do
Answer the questions that come up when you’re standing there. Not the mood of a place — the order of operations. Which door, which machine, who to ask, what it costs, what happens if you get it wrong.
That’s the one thing I can offer that a visiting writer can’t. I’ve been through these doors. I know which step people get stuck on because I’ve watched it happen.
How a page here gets written
I check Korean sources first — government pages, the tourism organisation, the operator’s own Korean-language site — because the English versions are often thinner and older. Where there’s an official figure I use it and link to it. Where there isn’t one, I say so rather than inventing a number that looks authoritative.
That last part matters more than it sounds. A lot of what gets repeated in English about Korea is a number somebody guessed in 2019 that everyone has been copying since. If you see a price on this site with no source attached, it’s a rough guide and it says so.
What’s here
- Korea Travel — Seoul, Busan and the cities visitors actually reach. What a place is like on an ordinary day, and whether the famous thing is worth the queue.
- K-Food — street food and restaurant food, what to order and how ordering works.
- K-Beauty — what’s in Olive Young and Daiso, and what Koreans genuinely buy rather than what gets marketed abroad.
- K-Culture & Life — the practical machinery. Bathhouses, hospitals, taxis, transit cards, tax refunds, clothing sizes, the minimum wage.
There are also a few tools I built because I kept wanting them myself: a clothing size converter, a won converter at the live rate, a trip budget calculator, a sale price calculator for working out what “30% off” actually comes to, and a Korean age calculator.
What I’m not
Not a guide, not an agency, not affiliated with anyone I write about. I don’t take payment for reviews or mentions — the contact page spells that out.
And not everywhere. Korea is bigger than the handful of places I know properly, and I’d rather leave a gap than fill it with something researched off other people’s blog posts. The site grows toward the places I can actually speak for.
If something’s wrong
Tell me. Prices move, places shut, rules change, and I get things wrong like anyone. Corrections are the most useful mail I get — here’s how to send one.