One of the major reasons why I always love to plan out my trip as much as possible is because you sometimes just never really know what to expect. What you think you know is not what you actually think. Once we finally touched down in Seoul, all havoc broke loose. A large portion of this was just because I was not as prepared and didn’t look into some of the minor, but very important details!
1. No E-SIM or portable WIFI
I have no clue how this was overlooked because I was so on top of this for my trip that I took in Japan. When touching down from the flight, I turn my phone off airplane mode and I’m immediately shocked by horror that I don’t have reception and that the airport WIFI was pretty bad. After about 30-45 minutes of sitting down on the bench and being stressed out and frustrating my partner (Sorry Satenik!), I finally got internet on my phone!
2. Ubering in Korea can be daunting for the first time
When we called our Uber from the airport, the driver showed up and spoke no English at all. Normally this is not much of an issue, but the hotel address on the reservation was not clear and so it gave him issues when he was trying to navigate it. We eventually figured it out, and the place that it brought him too was actually across the street from the actual hotel location, but close was better than stranded in the middle of nowhere. One thing that I noticed is that locations and addresses work a little bit differently in Korea. Hence why most individuals use 3rd party apps for travel such as NAVER or KAKAO Maps. I would recommend looking this up prior to going to your hotels and verifying the addresses as Korea sometimes has 2 addresses for locations.
3. Do not forget travel adapters!
This is a must not forget! We knew something was missing throughout the beginning on our first day there and then it hit us. Our phone batteries were draining and when we got to the hotel and looked for the outlet to plug in our phones, we knew we were screwed. With our remaining battery life, we looked up what was the closest place to find an adapter, luckily we were only 10 minutes out from a DAISO, but that was a very big jump scare for a few minutes when I thought we were going to be stranded in Korea with no working phones.
4. Bring some cash! (Or do your research first)
One big thing we struggled with was that there were things we wanted to eat and buy that places only took cash. In a world where cash is slowly going away in most countries, Korea was still using cash very regularly. We came with no cash initially after both of our banks not allowing us to exchange for KR WON. After reading online about many people saying its super easy to exchange and pull out cash in Korea, we did not worry at all. After going to an ATM, we realized that what we read was untrue! Handfuls of ATM’s later, declining both of our debit card’s we finally got lucky when mine finally went through. A sigh of relief came out from the both of us and I made multiple withdrawals from that machine, afraid that I might have a similar issue with other ATM’s down the line.
