AkaSha : Global Wellness & Culture

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...

Chuseok is Korea's autumn harvest holiday, it lasts about three days, and for those three days it takes a good share of the country's shops with it. The street tells you nothing about this. Shutters down, no note, no reopening date. Give up on the shops for those days and spend them in the palaces. During the holiday the four Seoul palaces, Jongmyo Shrine and the Joseon Royal Tombs open free, Jongmyo drops the reservation it normally requires, and the people who usually fill all of them are not in the city. The free ticket is the smaller half of that. The reason to go is the emptiness, and where it went. Why is everything shut? On Chuseok morning I did charye, a short rite for the ancestors. It happens in a lot of households on the same morning, which is why the closing is so general and why nobody bothers to post a sign about it. So a closed shop during Chuseok is not information about the shop. It's information about where the owner is. That is the whole differ...

Search "Seoul hanok village" and two neighbourhoods come back on the same page of results: Bukchon and Ikseondong, close enough to walk between, the same tiled roofs in both. One of them is a street people live on. So in Bukchon, build the afternoon around a door rather than around the alley: a shop, a tearoom, a hanok you have booked a night in. In both of these neighbourhoods, Bukchon included, what I did was walk through a door and sit down. Do that and you stop being a person looking at the outside of somebody's house, which is the whole difference, and by the time you leave you will also know why Ikseondong is the other kind of place. That is a narrower claim than knowing either place, and here is the other narrow thing: I have never been in Bukchon during the restricted hours. Everything below about the rule is the city's account of it, not a scene I stood in. Why does one of them have visiting hours? The rule covers one stretch of Bukchon rather than t...