Transportation in Seoul

The transportation system in Seoul is rated the best in the world and it probably really is.  If you have ever been to San Francisco, then there is a chance you have taken BART.  (I don't know anything about the subway systems in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, etc so I can't speak for them).  The subway system in Seoul is much more reliable, faster and easier than what I have experienced in California.  

First you want to go to the app store on your phone and search for this app.  Despite whatever other transportation app anyone else recommends, I have found this one to be the absolute best and most reliable.  It also does not crash which is a plus.  It is available on android and IOS (I don't know about blackberry market or windows store though).  You also DO NOT need Kakaotalk for this app and the default is in English (at least it was for me).  This app is strictly for the subway though.  

Second, You will want to get one of these.  It is your transit pass and much more.  It is called T-Money and comes in all sorts of design variations (I was at a grocery store the other day for instance, and they had about 6 different T-Money cards themed after the Kakao friends).  You need this to get on the subway and the bus.  Using a T-Money card saves you 100 won on the bus fare so...why not.  You can have one sent to the airport up to a week before you arrive at Incheon if you get it from thearrivalstore.com like I did.  It came with enough money preloaded to get into Seoul with a little left over.  

Third, this picture shows you what certain symbols on the map mean.  The map will also show where things are like palaces and landmarks so that if you want to visit those places, you know where to get off.  

This is what the routes look like.  They are color coded and numbered with names of stops in both English and Korean.  Heuksok is on line 9.  That is the closest stop to cau and is to the left of Dongjak (blue line/line 4).  Line 1 goes in and out of Incheon.  Yongsan has a subway station but if you want to go there, taking the bus is much faster.

This is the settings page.  You can change the language preference here (Korean and English are your only options).  

This is what a route plan looks like.  I put Dongdaemun here as the destination (Dongdaemun has really nice attractions and a really nice outlet mall called Hyundai City Outlets).  Anyway, this is what a normal route plan looks.  Shows you which way to go from your take off, shows you where to transfer and where to get off.  The estimated time has always been accurate in my case.  What you do to get this so press on Heuksok (your starting point.  You will press "from") and then look for where you want to get off, press "to" and this menu will pop up giving you instruction on how to get where you want to go, the cost and ETT. 

This is the menu on the left side if the map.  It is located to the left of the search bar.  In the search bar you can look for stops if you are unsure of the stop name.