i’ve only been to seoul once and i’m definitely no expert, but i really really enjoyed my time there! there’s a lot of nightlife, stores open late, restaurants are very hospitable, and there’s no shortage of beauty and skincare-related things to shop for.
people in seoul aren’t that fluent in english so it helps to know some common korean phrases like “thank you”, “delicious”, “check please” etc. you can also always use your phone to translate! i learned how to read some korean on duolingo in the couple days leading up to my trip which didn’t help a ton but at least it helped reading some signs.
one major culture shock that i experienced in seoul was the culture of “palli palli” which basically means “hurry hurry”. people move very quickly there and they’re all about efficiency, whether it’s deplaning from the airplane, checking out in line with the cashier, catching a subway connection, really, anything. everything is fast and you just have to learn to keep up with the pace.
seoul is pretty credit-card friendly but not quite apple-pay-friendly yet. there were a couple places that we needed to use cash for so it’s good to have some on hand (for example, topping up your transit card at the subway station), or buying street food.
google maps is almost completely useless here. for reviews and navigation. use Naver Map instead to get around and to check reviews.
i’m sure there’s some level of rating culture, but i found that most restaurants in seoul that have a decent number of people inside were really good. i didn’t end up relying on reviews or ratings that much, and instead just walked around until i saw something that looked good. seoul is really dense so walking around to find food isn’t difficult.
another thing about restaurants in korea is that they often specialize in one thing and will not really serve much outside of it. for example, if they’re a seolleongtang place, theyre probably just going to have a couple variations of seolleongtang on their menu, maybe some sides, and that’s it. this might be helpful to know just in case you’re expecting a lot of variety or options at restaurants.
we stayed at this airbnb in hongdae - it was absolutely beautiful, spacious, had heated floors, and a gorgeous private rooftop. i thought hongdae was the perfect area to stay in - even though it was a little further from “central” seoul, it was full of fun shops, cafes, restaurants, bars, and it was very walkable. we later stayed in gangnam, which was a bit more sprawled and more of a “financial district”.
other popular areas: myeongdong
the subway system is pretty good - it’s reliable, comes often, and goes to most places. otherwise there are a lot of busses as well, which are also quite reliable and frequent. you can pay with a t-money card which you can get at convenience stores. you can top up there or at a station, but you can only top up in cash which is kind of annoying.
if you do need to take a car, call with kakao-taxi instead of uber. ubers claim to be available but it often took forever to match with one if at all. kakao-taxi can be a bit confusing to sign up for because you need a kakao talk account and it also prompts you to enter a korean phone number. you can select the option to “pay in car” which circumvents the korean phone number requirement but this was frankly kind of hard to figure out. i would set up a kakao talk account and kakao taxi beforehand so you’re not scrambling when you actually need to call a car. we tried to hail a taxi just on the street but it seemed like few were willing to pick us up and probably all operate through apps.
unfortunately I don’t have a good google maps list mostly because we barely used google maps here but here are some general recommendations