Lucas Clasen
All photos courtesy of Lucas Clasen
When I was in Korea and Japan, figuring out how to use public transport was a real challenge. Seoul, Korea had a pretty straight forward system, with the ticket machine and the location names being in English. In Wonju, where the university is located, the transit system is very different, and was very confusing to me. Nothing was in English, and there were no maps or guides to traversing the trains or buses around the city. Osaka and Kyoto were similar stories to Wonju, with hardly anything in English, especially with the ticket machines or transit maps, which very rarely used any English at all. As such, they needed to be translated.
For translating help, Google Translate is by far the best option to use, as it is available in nearly all languages, has a camera translation feature, which is very useful if you cannot spell in foreign writing systems. It also has a handwriting feature that lets you write out the word you see and it will translate as best it can. In Korea, Papago is also a good option for translating.
Finding out how to navigate the transit systems was even more difficult than translating, as most apps need internet to work. Maps.me was a good option to use in most countries because of its offline functionality, as well as Google Maps, but I recommend not using Google Maps in South Korea, as it works very poorly and hasn’t been updated there in years. For Korea, Naver Maps and Kakao Maps work well.
For metro systems, they can be terrifying to try to figure out at first, but they aren’t as bad as they seem. I recommend downloading city specific transit/metro maps (just look up “blank city metro” in the app store and you’ll find many apps). Most of these work offline, so as long as you know where you are and where you need to go, just follow the map and the location screens in the train cars and you should get to your destination just fine.
