The time is 6:00pm... your at your office, it is a Thursday night, you want ... you want to be at your public speaking club at 7:30pm. The streets are as crawdad as you would expect in a Thursday evening... what would you do?
It’s Saturday morning you wake up @7:30am , you wanna meet your friends for hiking at a mountains .... it is 50kms away and you need to be there at 9:00am... how can you reach there early without spending a fortune?
It is Sunday, you and your friends agreed to meet a really nice restaurant at a new area in Seoul which you’ve never been to... do they have to send you a map? where will you meet with them?
The answer to all above is.... use the subway!
Ok, so Seoul is not the only city with subways... granted...
However, which subway system do you know which would allow you go from one side of the city to the other with less than 3 dollars???
As a matter of fact, the average cost is 1.5$ per trip!
I mean, ok, I love Japan’s metro... it is very quite and neat... however, it will cost you a considerable amount of money only to travel two stations! (a minimum of 2 dollars... !) you can easily find yourself spending 10$ taking the metro in Tokyo!
That’s why in Tokyo you see a lot of people riding the bicycles, it makes sense financially.
Even in Europe, while it is cheap to take the metro, it doesn’t compare to Seoul’s costs. The only please I know of which is cheaper than Seoul is China... there it will cost less then 1$.
People here use the metro station’s gates as a rendezvous points... (ok, see you at Yeoksam station, exit no.3) or (arrive to Itaewon station, go to exit 2, then walk 200 meters and you will find the place on your right)
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| Distances between stations |
In addition to the advantage of using the metro, you can also use buses. I heard from some people that if you would use a certain buses which happen to be on the same route as your subway, they would not charge you at all. or they would charge you less considering that you have just used the subway.
One more thing which I love here.... the taxies!! They are “compared to other places I have been” is cheap!
I mean, I have been living in Dubai for the last few years, and I travelled to Europe and Japan... firstly in Japan, don’t even dream of taking the taxi! It is sooo expensive... in fact, I saw an ad advertising a helicopter ride from Narita airport to downtown Tokyo, comparing it with taxi fair! (check it out here)
To compare the average trips in countries I been to:
Dubai: 15~20 dollars
Madrid: 20 dollars
Seoul: 10 dollars
Japan: 25~30 dollars
Germany: 20~25 dollars
After putting down those prices, I googled this and I found this nice list comparing the costs in different countries per 3km
However, that list doesn’t take into account the cities’ roads nature... for example, in Dubai it would be very normal to run 90km for a trip, and in Seoul or Japan, the density of the city is much more higher, you would never go over 20-30km in a trip. So, I stand by my “costs”
Actually, in countries like Japan, it would sometimes cheaper to rent a room for the night (esp. after mid-night, when metros and buses stop) then to take a taxi home at night rates!
And one more thing, in Korea in general, public transportation from a city to city is cheap! (compare to Japan and Europe, in some cases the bullet train’s cost is very much similar to the cost of a plane ticket! ^^
Well, people in Seoul, enjoy your country while it is inexpensive! You never know what will inflation bring you !!
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