Trip basics

A few practical basics make a Korea trip smoother, and none of them are complicated. Here are the essentials for Busan and Gyeongnam — the things worth sorting out before you go, or in your first hour on the ground.

Korea is an easy country to travel: safe, efficient, and built around cards and phones more than cash and paper. The notes below cover money, getting online, language and a few small courtesies.

Money

The currency is the Korean won, and cards are accepted almost everywhere — shops, restaurants, taxis, even the subway — so you rarely need to carry much. The exception is traditional markets and small street stalls, where cash is still the rule; keep a modest amount on hand for those and for temples.

ATMs marked “Global”, found in convenience stores and banks, take foreign cards, and larger shops and department stores can handle the tourist tax refund on the spot or at the airport. Tipping isn’t part of the culture — the price you’re quoted is the price you pay.

Getting online

Get connected on arrival: prepaid SIMs, eSIMs and pocket wi-fi routers are all sold at counters in the airport, and any of them will keep your maps and translation working. Korea’s mobile data is fast and cheap, and public wi-fi is common in cafés, stations and shops, if patchy on the move.

One thing worth knowing before you rely on it: Google Maps gives only limited walking and driving directions in Korea. For getting around, download Naver Map or KakaoMap instead — both have English, and both are what locals actually use — and a translation app such as Papago covers most menus and signs.

Language and signage

Korean is the language, but you can get a long way without it. Subway and train signs and announcements come in English, major tourist signage is bilingual, and younger staff will often have some English; a translation app closes the rest of the gap.

On this site, restaurant names are kept in Korean with a romanized reading rather than translated. That’s deliberate: a translated name won’t match anything on a Korean map app, but the Korean text or the romanization lets you search it, or show it to a driver, and actually find the door.

Etiquette

A few small courtesies go a long way. Take your shoes off where you see a raised floor or a shoe rack, pass and receive things — money, a cup, a card — with two hands or a hand on the wrist, and keep your voice down on public transport, where quiet is the norm.

Tipping isn’t customary and can even confuse; the menu price is the whole of it. Rubbish is separated into recycling and food waste more strictly than many visitors expect, and a little care with elders — a slight bow, letting them go first — is always noticed.