Everything I Got Wrong: Six Months in Seoul
Posted by Sarah Chen | 14 March 2026
I arrived in Seoul in September with two suitcases, basic Korean phrases I'd memorised from an app, and the kind of misplaced confidence that comes from having watched too many K-dramas. Six months later, I can say with certainty that nothing — not the language app, not the dramas, not the guidebooks — fully prepared me for the bewildering reality of actually living there.
The first thing I got wrong was the bowing. I knew that Koreans bow as a greeting, so I bowed. A lot. To everyone. My neighbour, the cashier at the convenience store, a random person who held a door open for me. I thought I was being respectful. My colleague later explained, gently, that the depth and duration of a bow communicates your relative social status — a quick nod for equals, a deeper bow for elders or superiors. I had been bowing identically to everyone, which, apparently, was both slightly comical and slightly strange.
Korean society is deeply hierarchical, structured around age and seniority in ways that quietly govern almost every social interaction. At my first work dinner, I waited for the most senior person to sit before I sat down, which was correct — but then I poured my own drink, which was not. In Korea, you pour drinks for others at the table; they reciprocate. Pouring your own is considered a little antisocial, as if you're signalling that you'd rather not be there. I had been sending that signal for three weeks without realising it.
Food was another area where I was, for a long time, entirely oblivious to what was happening around me. Meals in Korea are communal: a central spread of shared dishes surrounds a main course, and you eat from these together. This is warm and generous and completely unlike the individual portions I was used to. But there are rules within the generosity. You don't stick your chopsticks upright in rice — this resembles funeral incense. You don't flip fish to the other side on the bone; you eat from one side only. You wait for elders to begin eating before you start. None of these rules are posted anywhere. You simply absorb them, or you don't.
What surprised me most, though, was how quickly I became immersed in the rhythms of daily life once I stopped trying to map Korean customs onto what I already knew. The city has its own pace — fast, efficient, intensely connected — and once I stopped fighting it, it began to feel natural. I started to understand the subtle social cues that indicated whether a conversation was truly welcoming or merely polite.
The moments that changed me most were not the grand cultural discoveries but the small ones. A stranger at a street food stall who noticed I was confused by the menu and simply ordered for me, then refused to let me pay. A colleague who stayed late to help me fill in a form in Korean that would have taken me hours alone. An elderly woman on the subway who wanted to practise her English with me and ended up teaching me three words I still use daily.
I came to Seoul thinking culture shock was something you experienced once — on arrival — and then recovered from. What I discovered is that it comes in waves. The first wave is the obvious disorientation of landing somewhere entirely new. The second, which hits weeks later when the novelty has worn off, is subtler and harder: the slow realisation that you have been operating on assumptions that no longer apply, and that rebuilding your understanding of how social life works is a long and sometimes humbling process.
I leave Seoul having got a great many things wrong, having been corrected more times than I can count, and having had some of the best meals, conversations, and experiences of my life. Culture shock, it turns out, is not an obstacle to understanding a new place. It is the understanding.
Sarah Chen is a freelance writer and ESL teacher currently based in Seoul.