About this site
This is a family site with two halves that belong together. One half is a set of practical guides to Korean culture and everyday life, written for people visiting Korea or moving here. The other is a growth diary for our daughter, INa — known in the family as Jelly GGumi — born in South Korea on 6 June 2024.
Who writes it
I am INa's parent, and I live in Korea. The guides here are not compiled from other travel sites: they are written from doing these things, in Korean, as a matter of ordinary routine — sorting the recycling, topping up a transit card, taking a baby to a bathhouse, arguing about which regional soup is best.
That is also the limit of what this site claims. It is a personal account, not an official source. It does not give legal, medical, visa or financial advice, and where a detail is likely to change — a fare, a price, an opening time — the guides deliberately describe how something works rather than quoting a number that will be wrong within a year.
What you will find
- Cultural tips — etiquette, holidays, names and forms of address, and the conventions that most reliably catch visitors out.
- Food and dining — how a Korean meal is actually structured, what to order, and the regional dishes worth travelling for.
- Travel and transport — getting around, the seasons, palaces, temples and the river.
- Daily life — the practical machinery of living here: convenience stores, connectivity, waste rules, shopping.
- Family diary — INa's milestones and the Korean traditions that mark them.
How it is written
Each guide takes one subject and tries to answer it properly rather than broadly: what the thing is, how it works, why it works that way, and what a newcomer gets wrong about it. Korean terms are given in Hangul with a romanisation, because the romanisation alone is often useless for actually reading a sign.
New posts go up roughly twice a month. Corrections are genuinely welcome — if something here is wrong or has gone out of date, please say so and it will be fixed and dated.
Where else this is published
Most of the day-to-day writing happens in Korean on Naver Blog, Korea's largest blogging platform. That archive is indexed on the Naver page. Photographs from the family diary are collected in the albums, and there are a couple of browser games built alongside all of this.
A short film
This is the video we made when INa arrived.
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