Last updated: August 3, 2026
Most blogs don’t have a page like this. I wrote one because the only thing I’m really selling here is that you can believe me, and that claim is worth nothing unless I show my work.
Everything below is what actually happens before a post goes up.
Who writes this
One person. Me, Jae Yong Lee (이재용). I’m Korean, I live in Seoul, and there’s no editorial team behind this. When a post says “I”, it means me.
There are no guest posts on this site, and I don’t accept them.
How a post gets researched
I start from what I already know, because most posts come from places I go anyway. Then I check the parts I might be wrong about, which is usually more of them than I expect.
For anything a reader would act on, I use primary sources:
- Restaurants and shops. The place’s own Instagram or Naver listing, plus recent Korean-language reviews. Recent matters. A Korean restaurant will change its hours and never update the sign.
- Transport, tickets, and entry fees. Official operator or government sites, never a third-party blog.
- Products. The manufacturer’s own ingredient list and claims. I don’t make medical claims about skincare or food, because I’m not qualified to.
- History and culture. A primary source or a real institution. If all I can find is the same story repeated across ten blogs with no source, I’ll say it’s a story that gets told, not a fact.
If I can’t verify something, I say so in the post instead of writing around it. “I’ve asked twice and gotten two different answers” is a more useful sentence than a confident guess.
Prices, hours, and how fast they go stale
Every price on this site is written as won plus an approximate US dollar figure, so you can tell whether 9,000 won is a lot without doing math.
Prices and opening hours are checked against a source or a receipt before publishing, and the post tells you the month I checked. After that, they rot. Korean restaurants raise prices more often than they reprint menus, and small places close with no warning at all.
So treat any price older than a few months as a rough guide, not a promise. If you find one that’s wrong, tell me and I’ll fix it.
When I’ve actually been somewhere, and when I haven’t
This is the line I care most about.
If a post describes a visit, I went. I’ll say roughly when, usually what I ordered, and what it cost. Posts with first-hand visits carry the details that prove it: the day of the week, the queue, the thing I got wrong the first time.
When I haven’t been somewhere, I say that in the post, in plain words:
“I haven’t been yet. It’s on my list for this fall.”
“I went in 2021, so treat this as a starting point, not current information.”
“My friend grew up there. Her one rule: skip the seafood restaurants right at the market entrance.”
I have never written “when I visited” about a place I didn’t visit, and I’m not going to. A made-up experience is the one thing that would make everything else here worthless.
Photos
Photos on this site are mine unless the caption says otherwise. When an image comes from somewhere else, the caption credits the source.
I don’t use AI-generated images of food, places, or people and present them as photographs of real things. If an illustration or diagram is generated, the caption says so.
Corrections
I get things wrong. When that happens I’d rather fix it loudly than quietly.
How to report one: email hellokoreacrush@gmail.com or leave a comment. Tell me which post, what it says, and what you found instead. A photo of a menu or a link to the official page makes it much faster.
What I do with it: I check it against a source. If you’re right, I fix the post and add a dated note at the bottom saying what changed and when. Small typos get fixed silently. Anything that changes the meaning, a price, a location, or a recommendation gets the note.
I aim to deal with corrections within a week.
If a post gets so out of date that patching it would be dishonest, I’ll either rewrite it or mark it clearly as an archive.
Affiliate links
Some posts contain affiliate links. If you buy through one, I get a small commission and your price doesn’t change.
Rules I hold myself to:
- I only link to things I’ve used, or things I’d tell a friend to buy.
- The commission doesn’t decide the ranking. If the cheaper option is better, the cheaper option goes first.
- Every affiliate link carries
rel="nofollow sponsored", which is what Google requires. - The disclosure goes at the very top of the post, above the first paragraph, where you’ll see it without scrolling.
The wording I use, exactly as it appears on posts:
Heads up: some links in this post are affiliate links. If you buy something through them, I get a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only link to things I’ve actually used and would recommend anyway.
You’ll never see “this post may contain affiliate links” here. Either it does or it doesn’t, and I’ll tell you which.
Gifted products and sponsored posts
If a brand sends me something for free, or pays me to write about it, that’s disclosed at the top of the post in the same place.
For a free product:
Disclosure: [Brand] sent me this product for free. They didn’t pay me, they didn’t see this post before it went up, and they don’t get to change it. My opinion is my own, including the parts they won’t like.
For a paid partnership:
This post is a paid partnership with [Brand]. They paid me to write about this product. I said yes because I’d already been using it for [length of time]. Everything I say about it here is what I actually think.
For a hosted stay or a comped meal:
Disclosure: I visited as a guest of [Name] and didn’t pay for my meal. That buys you nothing but my attention, so here’s what I actually thought.
What money doesn’t buy
Being paid or gifted never buys a positive review, and I’d rather say that specifically than in the abstract.
- No brand sees a post before it’s published.
- No brand can change a published post. If they find a factual error, that goes through the same correction process as anyone else’s report.
- Negative points stay in. If the sunscreen pills under makeup, that sentence stays.
- I say no to products I don’t want, and to any deal that comes with approval rights over the text.
- No paid links, no link insertions into old posts, no “sponsored guest article” arrangements. Those requests get deleted.
If a post ever reads like an advert, something has gone wrong, and I’d like to hear about it.
How AI is used here
I use AI in my workflow, and I’d rather tell you that plainly than have you wonder.
What AI does:
- Helps with research triage: gathering candidate sources, summarizing long Korean documents, suggesting angles.
- Produces first drafts and structural suggestions.
- Helps with English. I’m a native Korean speaker writing in English, and AI catches the awkward sentences I can’t hear.
What AI never does:
- It never invents an experience. Any place I claim to have visited, I visited. Draft sections that need a real memory are left blank and filled in by me, not generated.
- It never supplies a price, an address, an opening time, or a historical fact that then goes out unchecked. Those get verified against a source, by me, every time.
- It doesn’t publish anything. Nothing on this site went up without me reading the whole post, line by line, and editing it.
What I add before a post is allowed to go live: my own visits, my own photos, the specific numbers off receipts, the things that went wrong, and the opinions. If a draft has none of that in it, it isn’t a post yet and it doesn’t get published.
I think this is the honest arrangement, and it’s also what Google asks for. Their guidance is about whether content is genuinely useful and reviewed by a person, not about which tools touched it. A post nobody checked is the problem. That doesn’t happen here.
Comments
Comments are moderated. I remove spam, promotional links, and abuse. I don’t remove comments for disagreeing with me, including the ones telling me a recommendation was bad.
Independence
Nobody owns this site but me. There’s no parent company, no network, and no tourism board with a say in what gets covered.
Tell me when I’m wrong
Genuinely. Corrections make this site better, and the readers who send them are the reason old posts stay usable.
hellokoreacrush@gmail.com, or the contact page.