No Room at the Inn

You do the math: South Korea is expecting 140,000 visitors during the World Cup but has only 40,000 hotel rooms and 10,000 homestays. The government has had to enlist thousands of love hotels to plug the gap. They are called "budget inns" on the official accommodation website, worldinn.com, but most are the kind that rent rooms by the hourup to a maximum of four hoursand where guests slip in through entrances artfully hidden behind massive potted plants. Worried that foreigners may get the wrong idea, the government recently ordered the hotels to abide by some decency rules: they must eschew such...