About

Hi, I'm Min

I'm a Korean office worker, born in Seoul and still living here. This blog is what I do with my spare time.

Meliens started from a simple observation: a lot of what gets written about Korea in English is either a tourist checklist or a list of rules with no explanation attached. "Don't pour your own drink." Fine, but why? Who decided? Does anyone my age still care? The why is the interesting part, and it's usually the part that gets left out.

So that's what I write. Korean culture explained from the inside, for people who are curious about it from the outside.

What you'll find here

  • Etiquette, and the logic underneath it. Drinking customs, how age and rank shape the way people speak, what politeness actually looks like in practice.
  • Food, from what to order to how Koreans actually eat it.
  • Holidays and seasonal customs, including the ones that confuse visitors because the whole country shuts down for them.
  • K-pop and K-drama customs. The fan culture, the slang, and the things a show assumes you already know but never explains.
  • Everyday life. Convenience stores, apartments, public transport, the small stuff that turns out to be the most useful.

How I write it

I try to be accurate rather than impressive. When a post involves something checkable, like a legal age, a price, or a rule, I check it before publishing and I leave out numbers I can't verify. Prices and regulations change, so I go back and update older posts when I notice something has gone stale.

I'm also writing from one specific position: a Korean in his own country, which gives me some things and denies me others. I know how a company dinner works because I've sat through plenty of them. I don't know what it's like to arrive here speaking no Korean. So when I'm describing something I've only observed rather than lived, I say so.

If I get something wrong, I'd genuinely rather know. Corrections are welcome, and so are questions and requests for topics you want covered. The contact form in the sidebar reaches me directly.

Thanks for reading.

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Korean Drinking Etiquette: A Local’s Honest Guide

There's a particular silence that lands on a Korean table when someone pours their own soju. Nobody corrects it. Nobody explains it. Everyone just registers it and carries on, which is the thing about Korean drinking etiquette: it's enforced almost entirely by people being too polite to mention it. You can break three rules in your first ninety seconds and never find out you did. And the rules stack up fast. Which hand holds the glass, which way your head turns, whose glass gets filled first, whether you're allowed to pour at all. So here's the version I wish somebody handed out at the airport. Not the museum-placard explanation about Confucian harmony, but what actually happens at the table, why it happens, and what to do with your hands. The one idea behind all the rules Almost every drinking rule in Korea comes from the same place: age and rank decide how you speak and move. Korean has entire verb endings built around whether the person across from you is older...
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