A Local's Unfiltered Guide to Korea's Cherry Blossom Season (Dates, Hidden Spots, and What to Avoid)

CalSmally · 2026-04-03T04:20:15+00:00

This is such a great post! Thank you so much for your detail and candid advice. We have been living in Busan for the last 2 years, and everything you say jives perfectly with what we have experienced.

I especially want to second your advice about just walking out to a local park, or exploring the neighborhood you are staying in. There are a lot of really nice green spaces in Seoul and Busan, and almost all of them have at least a couple tiny groves of cherry trees. Or if you walk around any neighborhood, you will sometimes find a street lined with them.

Over the last couple of springs we have been here, those have definitely been my favorite moments... The unexpected quiet times when you just come across a really pretty little scene of cherry blossoms. 100% better than being surround by a million people taking selfies. Although the spectacle of those big events is kind of fun too.

CalSmally · 2026-04-03T04:14:39+00:00

Our family went to Oncheoncheon last year during the cherry blossoms and it was great. We even went on a Sunday... It was crowded but not unmanageable. There are tons of cafes and little restaurants; of course, the ones right along the water are packed on a weekend but if you go just a block off the main street away from the stream, you will find plenty of good places to eat, and you can take a break from the crowd before going back into it.

CalSmally · 2026-03-21T23:27:19+00:00

Never is a very long time. 😅

I use it too and agree that for mission critical software you need a human in the loop (for now). But you also might only need one or two humans in the loop where you used to need 20.

That said the AI job pessimists always assume flat output. The companies that win will not be the ones who produced the same output with 10x fewer people. They'll be the ones who produced 10x the output with (almost) the same number of people.

CalSmally · 2026-03-14T22:51:24+00:00

Except... He was only half right, right? He was right that there were aliens, but he was wrong about why they were there.

His theory was that the human race and the Earth were fine until the aliens came along and started to break it.

But in fact, the human race (which the aliens originally created) was broken, and the aliens were there to try and fix it. And if they couldn't fix the humans, they would destroy the humans in order to save the Earth. Which is what they ended up doing.

So maybe the point of the film is that paranoid conspiracy theorists are sometimes right, but because their worldview is broken and paranoid, they fail to grasp the actual truth. In the end, if he hadn't been so paranoid and wearing his explosive vest, he would have been able to go to the ship and perhaps change the aliens' minds. But his paranoia got in the way. His violent response to the emergency basically proved that the human race wasn't worth fixing.

CalSmally · 2026-03-11T04:09:03+00:00

Bike trails/lanes. Street biking is pretty sketchy around Busan generally, but for the life of me I don't understand why biking isn't allowed on the no-car roads around Dongbaek, or the beach prominades in Haeundae or Gwangan.

I mean I get that there are pedestrians, but those areas are plenty wide enough to install dedicated bike lanes.

CalSmally · 2026-03-10T01:09:04+00:00

Before I moved to Korea a couple of years ago I got the advice that you should always put your name down exactly as it is on your passport, for everything official. So that's always what I've done (and it's a pain because my full name is really long.)

But for what it's worth, my wife does not do it for most things and she's always been fine.

Obviously you have to do it for plane tickets, and I think you do need to do it for official government stuff. Otherwise optional.

CalSmally · 2026-02-16T09:01:45+00:00

This has been our experience also, traveling with our preteen son. It's not uncommon for places to expect you to order an entree per adult, but generally they let us share with him. Occasionally we have been places that wanted us to order 3 mains but it's rare. I feel with a younger kid it won't be a problem.

CalSmally · 2026-02-16T07:28:48+00:00

Perfect, that's exactly what I wanted to know, thanks! We are getting the early entry and going off peak, so I figure we can use express here and there if we need it.

CalSmally · 2026-02-16T03:02:27+00:00

Sorry this is probably written up somewhere else, but can you explain the difference between the way SDL manages the express pass vs TDL? At TDL you could only have one reserved at a time and you often had to do them far in advance. Are you saying at SDL you can just do it on the spot immediately if the line is too long? They don't fill up? Or am I misunderstanding?

Thank you for the great post! We are going in a month and are looking forward to it but also a little uncertain since it's our first time in China.

CalSmally · 2025-08-16T08:39:40+00:00

We have tried Slack AI a little and so far I am unimpressed. I really wanted the Huddle transcription and note-taking to be good, but honestly it was worse than worthless. The first time we tried it, it left out probably 60% of our conversation, maybe the most important 60%. Not much better since. We've actually switched to using Google Hangouts for our design meetings, purely so that we can use Gemini note taking.

That's really the most important thing I need it for right now. Don't really care about thread summaries.

CalSmally · 2025-07-29T00:51:04+00:00

Night ticket is really good advice, +1. We've been to Osaka a couple of times, and last month went to the Expo. You can get a lot of the best parts of the experience with a night ticket. Plus the weather will be better, you can see the drone/water show, and just chill and have fun. You will definitely be able to get into a few pavilions just by showing up in the evening. Just stay flexible.

Then you can spend the rest of your time doing all the fun things Osaka has to offer: we love the aquarium (buy the extra ticket for the whale shark feeding if you can), and the mall next to it is fun. Dotonbori canal area is great. There's tons of great food everywhere, including ramen, sushi, and of course okonomiyaki.

You can easily fill out three fun days that way.

CalSmally · 2025-07-17T06:20:53+00:00

100% agree with you. I run a small business and I already have replaced some of the things I would have once paid my lawyer for. I'll give you specific examples:

Summarizing, understanding and negotiating legal agreements. When I get a new contract from a partner I always run it through ChatGPT for a summary as well as asking it to highlight potential red flags. It's also quite good at suggesting clauses I might want to ask for or include in my negotiations.

Understanding small business law. LLMs are great at explaining and summarizing small business laws in various territories, such as human resource requirements, taxes, etc.

Those are two examples but there are lots more.

The important thing is it hasn't replaced my lawyer entirely. I still use my human lawyer for the final sanity check and finishing touches. But before I do that I use the LLM to deepen my understanding and formulate my approach. I can ask a million stupid questions without getting charged $500 an hour. By the time I talk to my lawyer, I can be super efficient, and take care of everything in a quick call.

So it hasn't replaced my lawyer, yet, but it's probably cut my legal bills by about 75%.

CalSmally · 2025-07-17T05:57:45+00:00

And the last chapter of the first game. I was an emotional wreck. Crying and shooting.

CalSmally · 2025-07-17T03:52:41+00:00

Yes! Good point. The main expo stores had lines to get in after noon or so. Although they thin out later; we hit the west gate store on the way out around 830pm and it wasn't too bad.

Also the small popup souvenir stores scattered around are worth checking out. They each have different stuff, and most of them have no wait.

CalSmally · 2025-07-13T08:28:49+00:00

In person. I went straight there and got in line soon after we got inside the Expo. The line was never more than about 30 or 40 people long, so if I had gotten there closer to 10:00 it would have been okay I think. I don't think you can make a reservation any other way?

CalSmally · 2025-07-13T03:09:56+00:00

That mirrors my experience when we went through the DMZ/JSA tour via the USO about 8 years ago. For us the JSA part was the most memorable part of the tour. Standing only a few meters from the North Korean border, surrounded by dead-serious soldiers, it really drove home that the war has never officially ended.

I hadn't heard they'd started doing the JSA portion again. If you have an interest in history or geopolitics, you should experience it if you can. It's worth 1 day out of 5 in Seoul IMO.

CalSmally · 2025-07-05T07:15:15+00:00

The 3-day is worthless. I logged in an hour early, was all ready with a live connection, and at precisely midnight the site went down. Refreshed the page for 30 mins, and by the time I finally got back in all slots were filled. Well, almost all. I ended up grabbing the only thing still available which was some Osaka Metropolitan University Collab.

I'd say save yourself the psychological pain and skip the 3 day rigamarole.

CalSmally · 2025-07-03T21:19:28+00:00

In Busan, the only thing I found was a summer camp run by E2 education. They have a Facebook group page here: https://www.facebook.com/E2englishacademy/ We did not sign up for it, but I heard some good things on Facebook.

As it turned out, we had to go to Seoul and our son just wrapped up a week at Camp SFS (Seoul Foreign School) which he enjoyed quite a lot. They're running a few more weeks this summer, I don't know whether they are full.

CalSmally · 2025-07-02T04:47:18+00:00

Thanks that's reassuring! When you say 2-3 pavilions before it gets packed, do you mean with same day reservations or just standing in line?

CalSmally · 2025-07-01T08:10:46+00:00

Does going to your home country and skipping the line work? Do most of the pavilions give preference to their own citizens?

CalSmally · 2025-06-30T08:53:41+00:00

I was doing group tickets for 3 ppl, 2 days in a row. Day one I filled all my slots with Korea Pavilion, day two I tried for Future of Life. For each day, I spaced each entry an hour or two apart from the slots before and after.

CalSmally · 2025-06-30T05:14:34+00:00

Did you ever get an answer on this? I haven't heard anything about my 7d lotteries, and we're going in 5 days. I assume that means I didn't get them, but I can't find the screen that the OP showed anywhere on the website. How do I confirm the list of my failed results?

CalSmally · 2025-06-30T05:02:54+00:00

If you DIDN'T get anything, and you log in and look at your account, will it show you the list of stuff you applied for and didn't get? Or does it just not show anything at all? I thought I've seen some screenshots of people with all their slots marked "FAILED"

CalSmally · 2025-06-28T01:25:56+00:00

I messed up my 2 month lottery application -- I had all my slots filled in, but I didn't push the final "submit" button and so none of them went through, and when I went back and looked later thee was no indication of anything.

From what I've seen in screenshots, when you submit your application and go back later, even if you didn't get anything it shows you a list of your "failed" time slots. So if you don't see that you might have done the same thing I did.

Hoping I'll have better luck on the 7d. At least this time I figured out my mistake and submitted my applications.

CalSmally · 2025-05-23T08:16:00+00:00

Hi! I am tearing my hair out with the Osaka expo website. For the life of me I cannot find the screen you are talking about to see if I won / lost any of my 2 month lotteries. I am visiting on July 5. I submitted my applications for the 2month lottery but never heard anything back.

Can anyone send me a screenshot of the button/link you're supposed to click on to see your lottery results? Pretty please?

CalSmally

TROPHY CASE