Seoul · Photographed in person · No tourist traps
A running photo diary of everyday spending in South Korea. Real prices, real places — so you know what to budget before you land.
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Filter by category to see how far your won goes across food, transport and housing.
📍 Coupang Rocket Fresh (online), South Korea
I don't lug salmon home from the store — I order it on Coupang Rocket Fresh. It's at the door by dawn, and one slab this size is enough to hand-press salmon sushi at home to your heart's content.
📍 Apartment management-office bill, Seoul, South Korea
Live in a Korean apartment and your electricity, water, security, cleaning, elevator — even parking — all land on one sheet of paper each month. June's came to ₩306,790, so I went down the bill line by line to show what's actually inside it.
📍 a local mart, South Korea
The soft one. Chum-Churum's entire case is that it goes down without a fight, and cold, in a small glass, it makes that case well. Somebody at the table will defend it against Chamisul all night and change nobody's mind.
📍 OOZY Coffee, Seoul, South Korea
Barely bitter, more toasted nut than burnt, and cold enough that the first mouthful is mostly ice. The iced cup is ₩2,000, the number on the window says 1,800, and both of those are true at the same time.
📍 a local mart, South Korea
Sharp, hard-carbonated, best somewhere near freezing. Terra is the fizziest of the big Korean lagers and that's the whole point of it. This one arrives with Son Heung-min pointing at you from the front and his signature scrawled down the side.
📍 Morning Mart, Seoul
Soft cake, marshmallow middle, chocolate all the way around. One character brushed across the box, 情, is why this one carries weight other snacks don't. It's also the snack that runs the Korean army, and that's a bigger claim than it sounds.
📍 Morning Mart, Seoul
Nutty, thick, properly creamy when you catch it right. 숲속의 버터, butter of the forest, is the name it goes by here and it earns it. Miss the window by two days and the whole thing goes in the trash.
📍 Morning Mart, Seoul
Fuji apples with the honeyed patch through the middle: dense, loud crunch, sweet with a sharp edge behind it. That honey is also what Korean apple threads have been arguing about for years, and the argument is better than you'd expect.
📍 a local mart, South Korea
The green bottle people mean when they say soju. Fresh is the gentle one: cold, clean, barely any burn, and the bottle that gets opened first and argued about last.
📍 Morning Mart, Seoul
Korea's original shrimp snack, and after 50-odd years it still earns the tagline everyone knows: your hand keeps going back. Salty, savory, genuinely hard to stop — and the big zip bag means you don't have to.
📍 Barneys New York Beauty online mall (m.barneys-beauty.co.kr), Korea
Arrived today, haven't swallowed a single thing yet. So all I'm reporting is what I actually paid and what's printed on the box. Zero claims about results — from me, anyway.
📍 Bodram Chicken, Namgajwa branch, Seoul, South Korea
If Korea has one true national eating-out food, it's fried chicken — and half & half is the crowd favorite for a reason. Sweet-spicy sauce on one side, proper crispy fry on the other. Can't decide? You don't have to. That's the whole point.
📍 Myongji Boxing (명지복싱), Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, South Korea
Best thing I've signed up for all year. A survival show called 'I Am Boxer' aired here recently and suddenly everyone in Korea wants to box — I joined the wave, wanted cardio and stress relief in one shot, and got exactly that.
📍 GS The Fresh supermarket, Sinchon, Seoul, South Korea
Chobok just passed, and the leftover native chickens got slapped with 40% stickers — original ₩14,830, paid ₩8,898. Tojongdak is bigger and chewier than the usual young bird, and that tough, springy bite is exactly why I grab one now and then.
📍 Daiso, Sinchon, Seoul, South Korea
Growing up, we tore into dried squid and squid legs like other kids ate chips. The buttered version is salty, nutty, a little sweet — put a beer next to it and the bag's gone before you notice.
📍 Purune food-supply mart (푸르네 식자재마트), Seoul, South Korea
There is no Korean pantry without a can of this. Goes into gimbap, into kimchi stew, gets mashed with mayo over hot rice. Zero glamour, endless jobs — that's exactly why every household stockpiles it.
📍 Hong Ssaem Tteokbokki (홍쌤떡볶이), Jeungga-ro 221, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul
The second I dipped a piece of sundae into the tteokbokki sauce, I remembered why bunsik is basically its own food group. Nothing fancy, everything exactly right.
📍 Purune Mart (푸르네 식자재마트food-supply mart), Seoul, South Korea
In Korea, Spam isn't canned ham — it's a gift. Come the holidays, Spam gift sets pile up at every apartment door, and nobody thinks that's weird. The can on this shelf is the backbone of half our home cooking.
📍 Seoul Metro, Seoul, South Korea
Honestly one of the best transit deals anywhere. ₩1,550 gets you across a city of ten million on a system that's clean, fast, and easy to use in English. The only things that'll catch you off guard: the airport express and the Sinbundang line.
📍 Daiso corner inside an Emart Everyday supermarket, Seoul, South Korea
It's a thousand won and the bristles don't shed. For dabbing color on the outer corner or smudging your lower lash line, it does the job, period. Your everyday main brush? Eh. But at this price you don't get to complain.
📍 Street fruit stall, Seoul, South Korea
Fair price for summer nectarines that are actually sweet and juicy. Only gripe: the sizes vary a lot, so your ₩10,000 might get you seven solid ones or five good ones plus two runts.
📍 Purune food-supply mart (푸르네 식자재마트), Seoul, South Korea
A milk jug with an actual handle — genuinely rare here, since Korean milk basically means 1L paper cartons. Same Seoul Milk everyone grew up drinking, just family-sized. Fair warning: it eats your entire fridge door.
📍 MEGA Coffee, Seoul, South Korea
One liter of iced americano for ₩3,300. Nobody's swirling this thing looking for tasting notes — but on a hot day, with a bucket of ice sweating in your hand for three thousand won, nothing else on the menu makes sense.
📍 Homeplus Express, Seoul, South Korea
The moment those green mesh bags start stacking up at the mart, that's it — summer's officially here. Three ears for under ₩3,000, and boiled right they come out chewy, almost sticky, with a nutty sweetness that sneaks up on you. It's not fancy. It's corn. But as a summer snack, the value is genuinely hard to argue with.
📍 Neighborhood mart, Seoul, South Korea
Is there anything more dependable than an egg? Fry one, boil a couple, and dinner's basically handled. Almost nothing on earth gives you this much nutrition for this little money.
📍 Tting-ho-wa (띵호와), a neighborhood Korean-Chinese restaurant, Seoul, South Korea
Jjajang or jjamppong — Korea's oldest food dilemma, solved by just ordering both. The jaengban jjajang came with proper chunks of squid and shrimp, sauce hugging every noodle, and the jjamppong broth was honestly fiery. Old-school place doing old-school food right.
📍 GS25 convenience store, Seoul, South Korea
The original king of Korean cup ramen. Yeah, the cup's small and it runs a little salty — but that red spicy-beef broth is comfort, straight up.
📍 HD Hyundai Oilbank self-service gas station, Seoul, South Korea
Fuel light came on, so I rolled in and topped off the Vespa — 5.533 liters and the tank was full. Korea prices gas by the liter, and not long ago regular was flirting with ₩2,000, which had everyone rattled. It's eased off a bit. For now.
📍 Purune food-supply mart (푸르네 식자재마트), Seoul, South Korea
Walk into any fridge in Korea and the blue Cass can is sitting front row. It's light, fizzy, and gets out of the way — which is exactly why it goes with fried chicken, pork belly, basically everything. Not a beer you think about. A beer you drink.
📍 CU convenience store, Seoul, South Korea
Same chubby jar since 1974, and it still beats everything next to it in the fridge. Trends come and go — this doesn't. National default drink, no argument.