The Problem with Korean Ghosts
Why do ghosts conveniently conform to the culture of the people seeing them? Korean folklore gives us the cheonyeo gwishin, Western traditions have their own recognizable specters, and decades of movi...
13 Sep 39min
The Museum That Won't Tell You Its Own Story
Joe visited a brand-new free museum in Seoul's Insadong neighborhood built on a six-year archaeological excavation. The dig exposed a layer of the city from the late 1590s, right before the Japanese i...
3 Sep 34min
Tourist Season: How is Insa-dong?
Topics Discussed Insa-dong as one of Joe and Shawn’s first experiences of SeoulHow the neighborhood has changed since the early 2000sTraditional Korean incense and surviving specialty shopsThe hidden ...
17 Aug 2h 12min
Tourist Season: Nami Island & Tourist Trap River
Topics Discussed Nami Island’s origins, General Nami and the false tomb, Korea’s domestic tourism boom, Winter Sonata and the early Korean Wave, K-drama tourism, artist Kang Woo-hyon’s transformation ...
10 Aug 29min
Tourist Season: The Dark Side of Korean Tourist Sites
Tourist brochures rarely tell the whole story. In this Tourist Season replay, Joe and Shawn revisit one of the podcast's most popular travel episodes, uncovering the wars, massacres, murders, ghost st...
2 Aug 1h 50min
Tourist Season: Tourists from Hell
This week kicks off our summer rerun series, digging up the best tourism episodes from the archive while we take a break from new true crime deep dives. First up: 141, Tourists from Hell. Years of run...
21 Juli 1h 26min
The Ulsan Family Tragedy
Episode Summary A father and his four children were found dead in their home in Ulsan after months of severe financial hardship. While the case was ruled a murder-suicide, the discussion quickly expan...
10 Juli 34min
The Weird Science Behind Korean Food Nationalism
Dark Side of Seoul Podcast Episode 316 The Weird Science Behind Korean Food Nationalism Episode Description A 2023 paper published in the Journal of Ethnic Foods argues that Korean cuisine developed...
4 Juli 46min
