Seoul This Week: Aug 10–16 — Pop Culture Long Weekend
The pick: Seoul POPCON, August 14–16
Korea’s largest pop culture convention takes over COEX in Gangnam for three days, Friday to Sunday. Doors are 10:00 to 18:00, except the last day, which closes an hour early at 17:00 — worth knowing if you were saving Sunday for a slow start.
It runs in three streams: GAME CON for console, mobile and indie games, COMIC CON for webtoons, animation, figures and cosplay, and LIVE CON for film, drama, music and streaming. The Ultimate Cosplay Battle is the one people queue for, and Creator Alley is where you meet the artists drawing the webtoons you read on the subway.
If you have been following Korean webtoons or K-pop from another country, this is the weekend the whole industry stands in one building — and almost none of it requires Korean.
August 15 is Liberation Day, and it makes a three-day weekend
Saturday the 15th is Gwangbokjeol, the national holiday marking the end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945. Because it falls on a weekend, the following Monday, August 17, becomes a substitute holiday. The whole country is off for three days.
What that means for you: banks, government offices and immigration are closed, so if you need any of them, go before Friday. Shops, restaurants, museums and palaces stay open and fill up with domestic travellers. The official ceremony is held at Gwanghwamun Square, so expect that area to be blocked off and loud in the morning, and taegukgi flags along the main streets all weekend.
Also running
Hangang River Festival ends on August 16. This is the last weekend of the summer riverside programmes — and the last easy answer to “it is too hot, now what”.
Hangang Bamping keeps 200 riverside camping sites open all month, 100 at Yeouido and 100 at Ttukseom, 17:00 to 09:00 the next morning.
Seoul Fringe Festival is in the middle of its run, through August 23. There is no selection jury, so the programme is unpredictable by design, and much of it is dance, physical theatre and music, where language is rarely the barrier.
Three guides for this week
- K-pop Seoul pilgrimage guide — POPCON is the indoor version for one weekend; this is where the rest of it lives all year
- Hanbok guide — it is Liberation Day week, and the palaces are a short walk from Gwanghwamun
- Seoul shopping guide — COEX sits on top of a huge underground mall, and unlike August outside, it is air-conditioned
Hidden gem: Bukchon & Seochon
Two hanok neighbourhoods on either side of Gyeongbokgung, and a good counterweight to a day in a convention hall. Bukchon is the postcard — tiled roofs stacked down a hillside with the modern city standing behind them.
One rule to know: people actually live there, so the red-zone lanes around Bukchon-ro 11-gil are open to visitors only from 10:00 to 17:00, and showing up outside those hours carries a fine of up to 100,000 won. Go early, and go quiet. Then cross west into Seochon, where the rules relax — old bookshops, small galleries, a neighbourhood market where lunch is still cheap, and no clock on your visit.
Next week
Monday the 17th is the substitute holiday, so the long weekend runs straight into it. The Fringe keeps going until the 23rd, Bamping runs to the end of the month, and the Seoul Sculpture Festival opens on August 29. See you Monday. — Kibi 🐾
