So, Seoul

This will be little more than a sign-of-life post for the benefit of people who know that I left Toronto, Canada, to come to Seoul, South Korea, yesterday, and are wondering if I fell off the edge of the Earth. I’m pleased to report that I arrived safely.

The good news is that there is a nonstop flight from Toronto to Seoul. The bad news is that it lasted just over 14 and a half hours, gate-to-gate. It didn’t arrive until just after 6:00 in the evening.

Plus, Seoul’s airport isn’t in Seoul. It’s in Incheon.

All of that is a long way of saying that I didn’t check into my hotel until a little after 8:00. That didn’t leave any time to do anything worth writing about this evening.

There’s an express train from the Incheon Airport terminal I landed at to Seoul. It travels nonstop to Seoul’s main train station in less than 45 minutes. Getting to my hotel from the train station would have taken about an hour on foot. Crawling on hands and knees would have required longer, but that’s irrelevant. Or I could have taken the subway, with a transfer between two lines. Rather than schlepping my luggage via either of those modes of transport, I took a cab. Getting one using Uber was a little more difficult than usual because it didn’t accept Apple Pay. I had to set up a credit card directly.

Navigating Seoul and the rest of South Korea

Oh, by the way, you may be wondering how I found the route and determined how long it would take to get from the train station to my hotel if I hadn’t used a taxi. That is another story. It wasn’t via the usual suspects.

Before coming here, I read that neither Google Maps nor Apple Maps, my normal navigation tools, works properly in South Korea. I tested them out while still in Toronto. It’s true. Both seem to find most of the places I looked for in Seoul. However, Google Maps could give me transit routes between two points, but not walking routes. And Apple Maps could give me walking routes, but not transit routes. Sheesh.

I’d read about a couple of mapping apps that are supposed to be better for South Korea: KakaoMap and NAVER Map. I downloaded both of them and tried them at home. (Both of their websites are in Korean, but both of their apps support English.) They both seem to do what Google and Apple Maps won’t do in Korea. I’ll probably try them both a few times until I figure out which I like the best.

Another piece of advice I found online is that, to travel on municipal transit in South Korea, you should get a stored-value card, Tmoney, and add funds to it. According to what I read, you can buy a physical Tmoney card when you arrive. Or you can load an electronic one onto Apple Wallet. (Probably the Google equivalent, too, but I wouldn’t know about that.)

But the electronic option is not quite that simple if you’re a foreigner. You can easily add the Tmoney card to your Apple Wallet using the standard method. However, if you do it that way, you can top it up with money only with a South Korean credit card. If you, like me, don’t have one of those, you can download an app from the company that runs Tmoney. You can use that app to set up the Tmoney card in Apple Wallet and then add money to it whenever you need. But you can’t add money directly via Apple Wallet, only via the app. Clear as mud, right?

I’m moderately certain that it wasn’t a scam to get me to download the app from the app store for a nefarious purpose. When I tried to install the Tmoney card directly through Apple Wallet without the app, Apple Wallet itself told me that I could add money to it only with a South Korean credit card.

Instead, I had to do it through the app.

I tried putting money on the card before leaving home. It worked. After adding money through the app, it did indeed show up in the balance on the Tmoney card in my Apple Wallet. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not a slightly more elaborate scheme to rip me off somehow. We’ll see, dear. (What? Me worry?)

I’d read that they are planning to eventually allow foreign credit cards without getting the app. So if you come to Korea in the future, it might be available then. (If you come to Seoul in the past, congratulations on mastering that time travel thing.) Maybe even by now, as far as I know. I set Tmoney up a few days before I left Toronto, just to make sure I wouldn’t have to struggle with it when I arrived.

Alright. I’ve issued my sign of life. I’ll get started with my Seoul and, more broadly, South Korea, adventure for real in this journal tomorrow.