About

Hi, I’m Taeho Yoon

I’m 31 and I live in Seoul. Not “lived in Seoul for a semester” — I mean I get on the 2호선 at rush hour, I know which convenience store near my place is 200 won cheaper on eggs, and I’ve stood in front of a subway ticket machine helping a confused tourist more times than I can count.

I started this site because of one specific thing that kept bugging me.

The thing that bugged me

A friend of a friend from Toronto was planning a trip here and sent me a spreadsheet she’d built from blog posts. Almost every number in it was wrong. Not a little wrong — the subway fare she had was from 2021. Her food budget assumed every meal was Korean BBQ. She’d budgeted for a “Seoul city pass” that doesn’t do what she thought it did.

None of the blogs she read were lying. They were just old, or written by someone who visited for nine days in 2019 and never came back to update the post.

That’s the gap. Korea changes its prices constantly — subway fares went up, then up again, promotions appear and vanish, the won swings against the dollar. A price without a date on it isn’t information. It’s a rumor.

So here’s what I do

I look things up, on the actual Korean-language page or the actual machine, and I write down the date I looked. When I say a ticket is 21,800 won, it’s because I had the booking page open on that day. When two sites show different prices for the same hotel, I go find out why instead of guessing — usually it’s a tax display setting, and that one detail explains most of the confusion.

I write in dollars first, won in parentheses, because most of you reading this are in the US or Canada and doing mental math is annoying.

What I won’t do

I won’t pretend I’ve done things I haven’t. I’m not going to write “I spent three magical nights at this resort in Jeju” if I didn’t. I live here; that doesn’t mean I’ve stayed in every hotel I write about. When I’m reporting a price rather than an experience, I’ll say so plainly.

I won’t fill in a number I couldn’t verify. If I couldn’t confirm something, I’ll write that I couldn’t. There’s a lot of that in travel writing — confident numbers with nothing behind them.

I won’t tell you Korea is cheap or expensive. It’s both, depending on what you do. I’ll give you the numbers and you decide.

Money, plainly

Some posts have affiliate links, and those posts say so at the bottom. If you book through one I might get a small commission. It doesn’t cost you anything extra and — this is the part that matters — it doesn’t change the numbers I report. Those are what the screen said on the date written at the top.

If that ever stops being true, this whole site is worthless, including to me.

Say hi

Found a price that’s changed? Something I got wrong? Tell me. I’d rather fix it than have someone budget a trip off a stale number, which is the exact thing that started this.