AkaSha : Global Wellness & Culture

Photo: Unsplash You sit down, you order one thing, and five or six small dishes arrive that you did not ask for. Kimchi, seasoned greens, something pickled, maybe a sheet of egg. These are 반찬, banchan , the small dishes that come beside the rice, and nothing about them is explained to you. They are free. So is asking for more. When a dish runs out, catch the server's eye and say 저기요, then 이거 더 주세요. What makes them interesting is the comparison. Three neighbouring countries put small dishes on your table in three different ways, and one of the three declines to charge you. The same small dishes, three different bills Who chose it Who pays for it Korea · 반찬, banchan The kitchen. You did not order it You don't. It is not on the bill Japan · お通し, otoshi The kitchen. You did not order it You do. It functions partly as a cover charge China · 凉菜, liangcai You do. It is a menu category you order from You do, as an ordered dish Japan's otoshi...

Autumn in Korea. Photo: Vishnu Murali (Pexels) Ten festivals are running in Korea this month, and finding the list is the easy part. Then you click through to a festival's own website, hit a wall of Korean, and go back to whichever blog post you found the list on. Do the opposite. Open the Korean page and press translate. That is where the day-by-day programme sits. I opened all ten official sites in a browser on 28 September 2026 to see how far you get without Korean. Six of the ten hand you an English link on the front page. That leaves four without one. What each festival publishes, and where Dates below come from the Korea Tourism Organization's English list, Korea's TOP 14 Autumn Festivals in 2026 , which its own page says was updated 1 September 2026 . Ten of those fourteen run in October. The English column records what I found on each festival's front page . Festival Official site Dates English 1 Andong Maskdance maskdance.com 24 Se...

The Han River at Banpo. Photo: Seo Mun-gyo — Korea Tourism Organization (KOGL Type 1) Your first warm evening in Seoul, the riverbank fills up: picnic mats, fried chicken boxes, beer cans. If you come from a country where an open container in a public park gets you a ticket, your first thought is the obvious one. It's legal. Seoul publishes a list of 15 prohibited acts for Han River Park, and drinking is not one of them. But there is a fine worth knowing about, and it starts at 1,000,000 won . The list of 15, in full The rules come from the Seoul Metropolitan Government Basic Ordinance on the Preservation and Use of Han River Park, Article 17 , with penalty amounts set in its Schedule 3. The city publishes both. Prohibited act Fine (1st / 2nd / 3rd offence) 1 Damaging or killing trees and plants 100,000 2 Severe noise or odour, or drunken disorder 70,000 3 Not picking up after your pet 70,000 4 Unlicensed street vending 70,000 5 Dog off...

You land at Incheon, clear immigration, and start looking for the counter that sells transit cards. Stop looking: nothing you can board at that airport needs one. Buy the card once you are in the city, at a GS25 or a CU, and bring won in cash to load it. What you are really buying is a set of fare rules, and those rules only start paying you back once you are riding in town. Nothing at Incheon needs the card Search the airport's own facility directory for 교통카드 (gyotong-kadeu, transit card) or 티머니 (T-money) and it returns nothing at all. T-money's own page does list the staffed bus ticket office at Incheon among its sellers. You just have no use for one yet: there are two normal ways out of that airport and neither one asks for a card. The airport railway's All-Stop train leaves from the transport centre on B1 at both terminals. From To Seoul Station Terminal 1 4,750 won Terminal 2 5,350 won A single-journey card costs 100 won more than t...

If you want one walk that explains Seoul, take the city wall. Hanyangdoseong is the fortress the Joseon court put around the capital in 1396, and the city keeps the route open as six walking sections that ring the old centre. Pick a section — that decides whether your afternoon is a ridge above the palaces or pavement between office blocks. Then work out which end you start from; your way home hangs on it. Two of those six sections have no wall. The city says so itself: along the Heunginjimun and Sungnyemun stretches the fortress is gone, built over, and what remains is the line it took. That is the real shape of it: eighteen point six kilometres, six sections, and two of them no longer a wall at all. So the question was never whether you've walked the Seoul City Wall. It's which of the six, and then a second choice: which of its two ends. Decide both before you leave the hotel, because the two ends of a section are rarely the same trip, and on the two hardest sections...

In Korean tradition the youngest person at the table grills the meat. At a grill house the meat arrives raw and the people at the table cook it themselves on a grill set into the middle of it, so somebody has to. That somebody will not be you. You are the visitor, you get treated as a guest, and the tongs stay on the far side of the grill. Reach across and take them anyway. The tradition is thinning out, which is part of why the table will be surprised when you step into it, though the surprise is not really the point. Picking up the tongs is the difference between reading that a custom exists and standing inside it for five minutes. Most etiquette advice written for visitors is defensive, a list of ways to avoid getting something wrong. This is the opposite kind of tip, and the fastest way I know to stop being a spectator at somebody else's dinner. Who actually ends up doing the grilling? December 2022, a company dinner, written up afterwards in a national daily . The m...

Rent a hanbok , Korea's traditional dress, for a day in Seoul. It is worn all over the streets around the palaces, the shops there hire it out by the hour or by the day, and wearing one gets you into the palaces free. Before you pay, hold the outfit up and count the pieces. You want two: a jeogori , the short top with a collar that wraps across the chest, and a separate chima , the high-waisted skirt, or a separate pair of pants. Two pieces, and Gyeongbokgung, Changdeokgung, Changgyeonggung, Deoksugung, Jongmyo Shrine and the Joseon Royal Tombs stop charging you at the gate. Changdeokgung's rear garden is the exception: it sells its own ticket and a hanbok does not cover it. Counting takes ten seconds, and it is the one part of the day you can get wrong for money. The scheme has run since 2013 , year-round rather than only at holidays, and the Korea Heritage Service's palaces bureau publishes the qualifying standard itself, in Korean and in English . This rule ap...