subway

When traveling around the world, you might have confronted numbers of people or situations that made you frown, or go ‘WHAAAT?!’ Korea is not an exception.

Here are some of the extreme situations (or people) that might surprise you if it’s your first-time travel to Korea. As mentioned, these are just extreme examples.

In my hometown, the means of public transportation around the city is by jeepney only and buses are for long distance travels. Although, I’ve also experienced riding the LRT in Manila and subway in Hong Kong, some things that one isn’t familiar with gives this scary and exciting feeling at the same time.

Seoul Subway Map in English, Japanese and Chinese ©SMRT (click to enlarge)

All countries have good and bad points, things which we can either complain about or praise. And while Korea has it’s faults, today I’m going to focus on the good things: 10 things which give Korea definite cool points.

Oreo Cereal

To the misery of Oreo-lovers everywhere, this cereal has been discontinued in every country…apart from South Korea. I regularly see it featured on lists along the lines of ‘foods we miss which no longer exist’. Well, come to Korea and stock up…

For some reason – I’ll never be sure why – a business owner saw fit to open a Subway restaurant in our little city of Yangsan, South Korea. There are no Subway sandwich places in Busan yet. In fact, I think they were only in Seoul – until now! We are extremely excited about this! One of the things we miss most from home is a good sandwich. Having a Subway in Korea is good, in Busan would be fantastic, but having it inexplicably open up here in Yangsan? That’s amazing! Naturally, we’ve spent a large portion of our time there over the last few weeks. On nearly every visit we’ve made to the Yangsan Subway, we’ve run into another foreigner doing the same! The Yangsan Subway has become a foreigner Mecca. With that in mind, we’ve decided to post some directions.

Once upon a time the Seoul Folk Flea Market (서울풍물시장) vendors set up shop around the Cheonggyecheon Stream in Seoul, Korea. Now they return each day to well-manicured squares of space within a recently built warehouse location. Some merchants refer to the market as The Ant Market due to its many moves over the years. Thankfully, a friend who is always in the know dragged me to the market a few weeks ago. I am very glad she did.