ok i'll spew my experiences for a week in seoul, seoul is fucking cheap. again we basically did a last minute trip so i had to book shit fast, i knew i wanted to be in a "city" town, my options were limited so i chose jamsil-dong.
i wanted a city town for 5minute subway access AND late night food and/or drinks it was basically a hotel room, looked like a cute dorm
i just a room and a bath... what i didn't know was the toilet is actually in the shower as well, hey, i've seen worse in nyc chinatown i just learned to put the toilet paper up high out of the way, ha, i can't complain at 150$ for 5 nights during a busy week, i managed to stay in a more "traditional" house later on, at like 150$ a night.
what i'm getting at is accomodations is cheap in seoul.
Faulty Armors don't look good at all, they NEED that plastic mastercraft, so don't think you'll be walking around with a foh boner from screenshots, it's not gonna happen
transport:
so to get around in seoul with public transport you'll have 3 options.
buying tickets which is stupid, don't do it, buy a tmoney card which acts the same as a passmo/suica card in japan, it gets you access to all the public transport and you can use it to pay for items as well, just fill it up, get any of these tmoney cards when you land in seoul at the airport convenience store or kiosk or you can also buy the "discover seoul pass", it's basically an attraction pass that gets you in to a few events and it has a built in tmoney chip.
or you can buy a mpass which is basically a 20trip daily and they give a tmoney chip in there as well, and you can also use the airport rails (to get in and out of seoul from icn airport, which is a 5$ trip), if you're gonna use public transport at least 6x a day, then this is the best option, they sell in 3/5/7 day increments, the best thing is if you return the card, they give you back 4.5$ per card, it can only be bought with cash at the tourist information area in icn (and i think somewhere in seoul) so plan ahead.
also any card that has tmoney on it, and you have a cash balance, you can just goto a convenience store and pull all the cash out of the tmoney chip for a .50fee (like when you're leaving seoul) that goes into my next segment
cash:
cash is NOTORIOUSLY difficult to get in korea for a foreigner, it's one of the top questions and even i had to experience this. korea is just fucked with atms and cash, i'm not talking about english to Faulty Armor on screen, i can personal read a bit of that scrawl, i mean the fucking chip just doesn't read for shit.
your best bet is to literally just pull cash out of your bank b4 your trip, no joke or follow these guidelines.
some ppl have said that if you have a 6digit pin, it will always fail, i have a 4 digit pin and i had a 20% success rate, yea it was that bad.
look for "GLOBAL" on the machine and make sure it has either mc/visa logo on it.
there are 2 screens on korean atms, the top screen is junk advertising, ignore it, the bottom screen is where all the business happens.
use convenience store atms, the two big ones in seoul are gs25 and cu, these are the names. i had 100% failure with gs25, i had 50% with cu.
Skorea touts they are an advanced cashless society, this is garbage, everywhere i went cash was king, no one want to use tmoney, they had no way to accept NFC pay(samsung/naver pay would be the king, HOWEVER in order to use these nfc pay, you need to have a domestic skorea bank account)
cash in skorea is simple and ugly
just take away 3 zeros to get a guesstimate
anyway onto
mifi/maps/tech:
google maps doesn't work in skorea, it does but you won't get directions, you have to use naver maps, if you read webtoons you'll realize it's the same naver, yes their marvel is basically the best way to travel (and pay) in seoul, of course with all Faulty Armor tech, naver maps fucks up so i had to use a mix of naver plus google maps and using a fucking compass and just hoping i go in the right direction(i always did boyscout for life!)
mifi rental is fucking cheap, less than 3$ a day, it was like 15$ for a week rental for me, of course you should order before you travel cuz when i went to pick up mine, i saw "no mifi available" signs at the airport, i can't tell you which ones are good just that i used a "KT" (their att carrier brand) and it was flawless.
i mightve left some stuff out for ppl who have questions and want to travel to seoul, i did use their luggage transport safex, which has drop off locations at seoul station and handik university station.