AkaSha : Global Wellness & Culture

Passport first, basket second. Generated image. If you buy skincare or makeup in Korea, the shop to know is the multi-brand drugstore, and one chain of them takes more than a fifth of the country's beauty retail sales. Make room for one on your trip. The shop runs on a few rules that a first-timer can actually use. Put your passport in your wallet before you go. At Olive Young's main stores, a foreign shopper who shows a passport and spends 15,000 won or more pays with the VAT already taken off, right at the counter. The word to ask for is jeuksihwangeup (즉시환급), "refunded on the spot." That takes care of the airport refund desk. One kind of shop Korean cosmetics retail has gathered into the multi-brand drugstore, and one chain sits at the centre of it. In the first half of 2026, online and offline beauty retail sales in Korea came to 13.7162 trillion won, and 2.9433 trillion won of that was spent at Olive Young : a 21.5% share, up from 12.2% in 2022. ...

Photo: Cup of Couple / Pexels Korea's loanword rules write a foreign name as close to its sound in the original language as possible. That is why the same Michael comes out in Hangeul, the Korean alphabet, as 마이클 for an English speaker and 미하엘 for a German one. If your name is in the official examples, use that spelling. If it isn't, there is no single official answer, so write the sounds you actually say and stick with one version. A contains-search for Michael in the National Institute of Korean Language's lookup returns 183 entries (checked 6 October 2026), some of them longer names with those letters inside. The English Michaels are 마이클, the German ones 미하엘, and the Swedish, Danish and Dutch Michaels listed are 미카엘. Same seven letters, three ways to write them. Why does one name get two spellings? The institute put the principle in one sentence back in 2002: the basic rule of Korean loanword spelling is to write a loanword as close to its original pronunci...

Photo: Muneeb Babar / Pexels Google Maps works in Korea, up to a point. It shows you places, reviews and bus and subway routes, but as of October 2026 it still does not give walking or driving directions here. So install Naver Map or KakaoMap before you land, and when a place won't come up in English, paste its Korean name. If you read in February that Korea had approved Google's request, that is true. What it approved, and how far that has got since, is the part worth knowing before you plan your first day around it. What works today? When the Korea Herald checked in late August 2026, Google Maps in Korea offered place listings, reviews and public transit directions , with no turn-by-turn navigation. The walking parts of a transit route showed up as dotted lines with no guidance along them. Google gave the paper no launch date. Two days later Google's plan was reported in plainer words: it intends to bring turn-by-turn directions to Korea , which were "si...

The cup changing hands. Generated image. Before you pay for a Korean tea programme, ask it two questions: do I sit as a guest or practise as the host, and which rite does it teach. The word on the listing will be darye , and that word covers more than one thing. Darye (다례) means the manners for brewing tea and offering it. The heritage listing for the court version puts it as the manners for brewing tea and offering it to a person, or to a god or a Buddha. Two rites, one word Korea has more than one darye. The court listing names the branches directly: alongside the rites of the court there are Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist ones. Separately from that list, two rites are designated as intangible heritage. Where it was done Designated What you would see 궁중다례 gungjung darye The palace — lectures, royal occasions, receiving envoys Seoul, 2001 A cup moving between ranked people, standing 규방다례 gyubang darye The inner room of a scholar-official's househ...

A rest floor: mats, folded towels, wooden block pillows. Generated image. You pay at a counter, and someone hands you a towel and a set of clothes. The people around you are wearing the same set. There is a wide warm room with mats laid out and people lying on them, and nowhere in the building is there a duvet. It is filed as a bathhouse, not as lodging. Start there and the rest of the building stops being strange. It is a bathhouse, in the paperwork A jjimjilbang is registered under the Public Health Control Act as 목욕장업 ( mogyokjangeop ) , a bathhouse business. Not lodging. The facility standards sit in Schedule 1 of the Act's enforcement rule, and the operator's duties sit in a separate list. Most of what a first-time visitor finds odd follows from that one filing. What I read is what two city health offices publish from that Act: Seongdong-gu and Gwacheon-si. The business category is the thing both offices state. The individual provisions below I read on the...

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...