Korea Unblocked

Two or three times a year I drive about thirty-five minutes from my flat and check into a hotel. For the twenty-six hours I am there I go nowhere and see nothing I have not seen. The next afternoon I drive back along the same road. If you are American, the word for this is probably staycation , and it means something else: the thing you do when you cannot afford to go away. It entered common use around the 2007–08 downturn and it meant staying at home. If you are British, the same word means a holiday somewhere in Britain rather than abroad. Neither of those is what I am describing. In Korean it has its own name — 호캉스, hokangseu , from hotel plus the French vacances — and the room I am describing lists at between ₩500,000 and ₩700,000 a night — roughly 350 to 500 US dollars, depending on the rate on the day. So: not cheaper, and not going anywhere. That combination is the part worth explaining. Twenty-six hours, in order I arrive a little after two. Check-in is at three, but...

I paid for a grocery order at 22:34 on a Thursday and went to bed. At 07:21 the next morning my phone told me it was outside the door: two boxes, left on the floor of the corridor, photographed by the courier. Three items, ₩15,200, about eleven US dollars. Chilled eggs among them. Eight hours and forty-seven minutes, and I was asleep for all of it. The app added a detail I want to put here rather than bury: I pay for the membership tier, and the same screen told me that got the order to me about six hours earlier than a standard account. The short answer Korea is fast. That part of what you have read is true, and you will feel it within a day of arriving. The explanation attached to it is not. Speed here is not a national temperament so much as a consequence of how many times a job has to wait for somebody else. Once you have that, the confusing parts stop being confusing — including the things that take a month, which are not exceptions to the rule but the same rule runnin...

I leave my laptop on the table when I go to the toilet. Coffee half-finished, bag over the back of the chair, screen still open. Four or five minutes. I have been doing this in Korean cafés for as long as I have owned a laptop, and so far it has never gone wrong. I do not leave my wallet. Same table, same five minutes, same room of strangers. The laptop cost many times what the wallet holds, and the laptop is the one I am relaxed about. I had never examined this until someone asked me to explain it, and the explanation turned out not to be the one I would have given. The short answer What gets written up in English as Korean honesty is not the thing doing the work here, and one man's behaviour over one cup of coffee is enough to show it. When I decide what to carry to the toilet with me, I am not judging the moral quality of the people at the next table. I am running a calculation, and it comes out differently for different objects. What stays on the table is what cannot ...

It's a Tuesday and seven of us are at a 정육식당 behind the office — a butcher's shop that grills what you buy at the table. Two tables. People sat wherever they arrived, except the three who drink, who ended up together at one end so they could pour for each other. We started at six, finished a little after eight, and said goodbye on the pavement outside. On the way home I bought ice cream for my wife. I've been going to these for fifteen years, and I lead a team now, which means I'm the one who books them. Almost none of that evening would have happened in 2015 — not the seating, not the finishing time, not the four of seven who drank nothing while nobody remarked on it. The short answer The Korean company dinner — 회식 — has not disappeared, and what it exists for hasn't changed. It is still the table where people say the things they don't say at their desks. What changed is the means: the alcohol, the hours, and the unspoken obligation. That sounds like an...

It's a Friday evening and there are four people at a plastic table outside a convenience store, drinking beer. Not in a beer garden, not on a licensed terrace — on the pavement, at a table the shop set out, under a parasol with the chain's logo on it. Fifteen minutes away at the river, a few hundred more people are doing the same thing on the grass, out of bags they carried in themselves. If you come from a country where any of that would earn you a ticket, the question arrives before you've finished looking: is this actually allowed? The short answer Yes. Drinking in public is legal in Korea, and there is no open-container law of the kind you may be used to. You can buy a beer in a convenience store, walk outside, and drink it on the street, on a riverbank, or in a park, and you have broken no law by doing it. The one exception is narrow and local: inside a designated 금주구역, explained below, even carrying an opened bottle can be fined. This is not a Korean peculia...