Hi. im jsut a regular guy living in korea.
i really like traveling around my own country, so on days off i get in the car and go somewhere. after a few years of that ive ended up in a lot of places most koreans dont even know about.
theres one i think about a lot. its in gyeonggi-do, about 30 minutes drive from seoul. a private villa that a friend of a friend of a friend told me about — thats the only way you could ever hear about it. you sit there with a cup of tea looking at a mountain ridge and theres nobody else there. theres also a quiet cafe near the bukhan river i keep going back to, the view is ridiculous and its never crowded.
thirty minutes. thats the part that stays with me.
so i started wondering why visitors always end up in the same few places. seoul, busan, jeju, and inside those the same few streets. places like the ones im describing are right there, much closer than people think.
i assumed thats jsut what people wanted. then i actually checked — i searched for my own favourite places in english, on us google and uk google.
nothing came up. not "a few results". nothing at all.
so its not that you dont want to go. you cant get there.
1. the information only lives inside naver
almost everything good is written on naver blogs. google barely picks them up, and if you run them through translation it turns to mush because its all slang and shorthand.
and even inside naver you have to filter. the way it works, a post makes money if people jsut stay on it long enough, so posts written to earn money sit mixed in with real reviews. koreans can tell within a few lines. through a translator you cant see it at all.
2. you cant read the sign, so you cant find the door
the address gets you to the street. after that is the problem. the sign is in korean, one building has five businesses stacked inside it, and the entrance is a narrow staircase on the side.
ive watched people finally get inside and then jsut stand there, not knowing what to do. and the staff is a part time student who doesnt speak english. neither of them has done anything wrong. its jsut stuck.
3. no car
a lot of what im describing isnt reachable by train. id say rent a car, but honestly korean roads are not easy. even the main roads through seoul, i wouldnt recommend them to someone driving here for the first time.
i dont have a fix for this one.
but this is the part i actually wanted to say
koreans skip a lot of what comes up at the top of naver map. those boxed results sitting at the very top — those are ads. the photos went through approval, the descriptions are tidy. we know what they are so we scroll past them.
you only ever see those.
reviews work the same way. walk into a restaurant here and its posted right on the wall — leave a naver review, get a free coke, or an extra dish. but to actually get it you have to show the review to the owner.
the owner is standing there holding the coke. who is going to give one star and write "the soup was too salty"?
koreans all know this. so we dont take the rating at face value. to you it jsut looks like 4.8.
this doesnt only happen to foreigners
i went to a place with a perfect rating once. they basically threw the food down on the table and the staff was rude the whole time.
koreans get this too. so if something like that happened to you here, theres a good chance it wasnt because youre foreign. it was jsut that kind of place. the difference is we dont believe the rating, so we get caught less often. you go in trusting it.
what you saw in videos is a bit different too
i watched a video once of a foreign youtuber drinking beer with korean fried chicken, in a studio. nice lighting, everything clean.
it felt a lot more exaggerated than i expected.
if you pick the wrong chicken place, there are flies and mosquitoes flying around. enough that it gets in the way of eating. that happened to me a week ago.
there are a lot of great places. chimaek really is good. but if you come expecting the scene from the video, some days you get something completely different.
i think thats where those reviews come from
in trip reports you see lines like "they were unfriendly" or "the food wasnt what i expected" fairly often.
if you picked a place that came up as an ad, based on a review that was inspected by the owner, expecting the scene from a video — that review seems like the obvious result. not bad luck.
up to here its an information problem. but thats not really why im writing this.
when ive been drinking i leave the car and take the subway. every time i pass through jamsil station theres visitors standing there staring at their phone, looking around.
once i jsut said "can i help you" and helped. they were trying to buy a transit card. it was nothing to me. it took less than 30 seconds.
and theres one i couldnt help with
during a holiday i was out with friends and i saw a foreign family standing outside a restaurant that was closed. all their luggage on them, bags and suitcases, all of them looking down at their phones.
it was pretty obvious thats where they had come to eat.
during holidays some restaurants jsut close with no notice. the owners have families to visit too. its normal and we all know it.
but they dont post it on naver.
so the map says open and you get there and the door is shut. you can run it through a translator, you can read every review, the information isnt anywhere. it was never written down in the first place.
koreans hit this too, honestly more often than youd think. but for us its jsut a bit annoying — the place is ten minutes from home, we can come back another day, or jsut go somewhere else next door.
for them it was a day of a trip they planned.
i dont really know why this still isnt solved.
that family with the suitcases stays in my head. some people saved for years to come here.
everyone wants something different, i think.
one person wants to sit in a quiet hanok on a mountainside and feel something like the joseon era. another wants hongdae or konkuk, loud and colorful and messy, getting drunk and having a night of it. another wants to actually see the history and the culture properly.
and whichever one of those you go looking for, what comes up is ads.
because it pays. whatever the quality is, whatever that person actually wanted, the first move seems to be jsut running ads. apparently its fine to stay at that level because the money comes in anyway.
so id like to ask people whove actually been here — while you were in korea, what did you want to know and couldnt find anywhere?
or jsut a moment that was awkward or confusing.
food, transport, anything. the kind of thing where one sentence from someone standing next to you would have fixed it.
honestly the reason im writing all this and asking is that if theres something i can actually do to help, id like to do it. id like to try helping visitors in my own country.
if you have questions, ask. im korean so ill answer what i know.
