I heard a foreign student visiting a friend's home for the first time stood in the entryway for a long while. He knew you take your shoes off, but he didn't know where the "inside" began. ## There's Only One Rule In a Korean home, the floor is your chair, your dining table, and your bed. So shoes must never touch the floor. If the entryway has a spot one step lower, everything up to there counts as "outside." Because of ondol, which heats the floor, a culture of living on the floor developed. ## Exceptions inside the home: slippers and sofas The bathroom has its own slippers. It's a place where water splashes, so if you go in barefoot or in socks, they get wet. However, you must not wear these slippers out into the living room. They're shoes you wear to protect the floor, so if they dirty the floor, there's no point. A foreign student asked me. "You have a sofa, so why do you sit on the floor?" Many people use the sofa as a backrest and sit on the floor. It's partly a deeply ingrained habit, and partly because in winter the floor is warmer than the sofa. ## Restaurants differ from place to place At restaurants with chairs, you go in with your shoes on. At restaurants where you sit on the floor, you take your shoes off. If there's a shoe rack at the entrance or the floor is raised by one step, that's where you take them off. On the day you go to a place like this, check your socks for holes. Even Koreans quietly care about that.