Notes on some differences between Korea and Australia

In 2014 I spent 12 hours in South Korea while I waiting for a connecting flight to Canada. In 2025, I returned to actually walk around a little bit. I spent 4 full days in Seoul, and enjoyed each one of them. As an Australian, and coming from 3 weeks in Japan, whenever I saw something new, niche, or interesting, I wrote it down. Here is an expanded version of that list.

Why is their card processing SO fast?

In Japan we mostly paid with cash. In Korea, we mostly paid with card. In Brisbane, when you pay with card the process is like this:

1. Tap Card
2. Wait 3 seconds awkwardly. Maybe say something like: "haha I hope this works" if you're feeling fancy.
3. Machine goes ding.

In Korea it felt like:

1. Tap Card
2. Machine instantly dings.
3. Korean shop attendant tells you to hurry up and remove your card.

I would love to know if this is all in my head, or if there is some sort of technical reason why it's so much faster.

Magpies

One of the first thoughts I had in Korea was: "What is this bird with the big wiggly tail". It was like a big willy-wag-tail or something. Later a walking tour guide (thx Sam) told us some information that helped us figure out it was an Oriental Magpie!

As an Australian, we know magpies all too well, but these guys seemed nicer and cuter. I love the way their tails move when they fly and hop around.

While walking through some of the Royal Tombs in Seoul, we saw a whole flock of "Azure Magpies" too, which really put our Australian Magpies to shame.

Cheap subway

Japan's subway is incredible. Seouls is also top tier, and in one aspect, it even beats Japanese trains. It's significantly cheaper.

Thanks to Brisbane's recent 50c fairs, our trains are incredibly cheap. Unfortunately they're also not really that good. Japanese trains are absolutely incredible, but can cost up to ~$3-4 for regular trips, and up to $8 if you're going somewhere a little exotic. In a city that pays on average significantly less than Brisbane, this is pretty rough.

Seoul has Japan tier trains with Brisbane level pricing.

Let people leave the train before entering?

On trains - why don't the public wait to let people off the train before getting on? Coming from Japan where everyone queues up perfectly next to the door, I was surprised when people just waited right in front of the door blocking it.

Double Walled Bowls!

The first meal I had in Korea was a piping hot bowl of soup. As the lady passed it to me in a metal bowl, I was hesitant to take it, for fear of burning my soft hands. When I eventually did take it, it wasn't hot at all! It was a double-walled insulated bowl. I didn't know these even existed! I don't know if this is a classic 🥶cold❄️ country thing that I just haven't experienced because I live in a 🥵hot🔥 place.

It was very satisfying to slurp hot noodles in freezing weather, outdoors, and have the soup stay hot.

The dining experience in Seoul feels optimised for groups.

Japan embraces the lonely solo-traveller. They say: "You know what, it's OK to eat by yourself and not want to talk to people". It feels like Korea is the opposite, and probably is more fun if you're travelling in a small group. As an example, I think Korean BBQ is probably the world's MOST fun meal you can eat with a group. You're eating yummy meat, that you all grill together. I've never had another meal where the whole gang cooks together and has a soju or two at the same time.

In addition to bountiful KBBQ though, you've got:

• Large fried chicken venues.
• Long warmed benches nestled around wrinkled vendors in markets where old friends all have a laugh.
• Street vendors who've hastily thown up tents around their whole stall and seating to keep everyone warm.
• Regular Korean food where you share a bunch of side dishes.

Maybe the increased sharing and uniqueness of cooking together makes it feel more wholesome, but I think eating with friends in Korea is nice.

Waste Disposal

Korea's waste disposal is - in my opinion - bad. Remember that this is coming from the perspective of a tourist who only stayed in the city, so I'm sure it differs from suburbs and rural areas. From what I can glean online, Korea has a complex waste disposal system that has evolved over the years, but in a nutshell it seems that:

1. You buy different garbage bags for different types of waste at the shops.
2. You place those in different specific places outside to get picked up.
3. They get disposed of.

But you kinda just plonk them on the ground, and if even 1% of the time this happens:

1. You buy a bag and meticulously sort your trash.
2. You place it in the correct location outside.
3. The wind blows your bag over and it rips.
4. Trash goes everywhere.

Then your city has rubbish everywhere. I feel like Korea's littering is probably better than Brisbane's, but it feel like we have less trash because we can't leave our trash outside (the birds would destroy the bags instantly and throw food everywhere), so I think we have less trash accidentally spilt.

If Korea fixed this and the ciggie butts, they'd be doing great.

Like, people have just continued to put things into this bag until it overflowed.

It's also not particularly aesthetic, even if they remain closed.

Crossroad Time

Walking around Seoul was a little rough. There are a lot of main roads to cross, and it takes a LONG time to cross them. At one interestion, there was a countdown timer that counted the number of seconds before we could cross. IT WAS OVER 90 SECONDS.

This makes me just not enjoy walking around the city. I don't think I ever waited that long anywhere in Japan, or anywhere in Brisbane.

Aegyo Sal Makeup

What is Aegyo Sal you ask? Aegyo sal, a term popularised in South Korea, translates to "charming fat", and it refers to the little lump under your bottom eyelid. Not what we call "bags under your eyes", just a couple millimeters below the lower eyelid. It's a style to excentuate these little "charming fat" bags with makeup or cosmetic surgery, because "it makes you look cute/young". It's definately a look and occasionally when it's turned up to 11, it looks weird, in a way I've never seen before. I also saw it on men in advertisements, which was also a little strange.

No kids?

While walking around, Helen turned to me and said: "I haven't seen any children in like 3 days", and I realised I didn't think I had either.

At first I was like: "Maybe they're in school", or "Maybe they're all playing League of Legends" or something, but it was actually a public holiday that particular day. Then we remembered that South Korea has at the time of writing this, the second lowest birth rate in the world at 0.78 births / woman..

So maybe there just aren't many kids?

Hangul is Awesome

Hangul is the Korean alphabet. I think it's really cool.

It was invented by a king in the 1400's to increase literacy, but I'm not a historian, so I'll you just read up on the Wikipedia page to learn more.

My favourite feature is this:

Korean letters are written in syllabic blocks with the alphabetic letters arranged in two dimensions. For example, Seoul is written as 서울, not ㅅㅓㅇㅜㄹ.

Something about arranging all your letters into a block is both incredibly satisfying to me, and really opens up the language to a level of typography that I don't think you can find in English. I really enjoyed walking around and looking at all the different custom signs around the city.

I'm also curious about how you would even go about making a font for Hangul. Because each block is made with the combination of a number of consonants and vowels, the number of block combinations skyrockets over 10,000! Naturally, Wikipedia's page on the language has a "unicode" section, so this problem was solved before I was even born, but it's still nice to think about.

Here are some cool signs I saw. I don't know what they say, so if you're Korean and it's wildly inappropriate, please let me know:

Replacing lines with dots is neat.

Aligning the lines is also neat.

Neon lights get complicated!

I don't even know what's going on here.

I'm not even sure this is still script, but it's cool.

What if all the straight lines were at an angle?

Identical Towers are not a vibe

After taking a trip to the top of the "Lotte World Tower" (at 555m tall, it's pretty epic), we saw a lot of different districts that looks like this:

and this:

I don't like it. Identical buildings are not a vibe. As I mentioned on a similar write-up about Japan (when I was talking about manhole covers actually), I mentioned this quote from ancient Roman architect Vitruvius: he states that all buildings should have three attributes: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas ("strength", "utility", and "beauty").

I'm sure these suburbs have strength and utility, but they do not inspire beauty - a serious failing.

In saying that, I wonder how much of Brisbane's housing problems you could solve if you just copy-pasted 20 of the same tower all over a suburb near a train station.

What the heck is Toowoomba Chicken

I live in Brisbane which is very close to the city of Toowoomba. I know of 0 other Toowoombas and it's said that the name derives from the Aboriginal Language. They're also not really known for high chicken fried chicken.

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw this on the menu of a big Korean Chicken chain:

What the heck is Toowoomba chicken? The waitress didn't speak English, so I zoomed in on Toowoomba on Google Maps and she looked at me like I was crazy. Can anyone explain?

EDIT: Ok, so I asked the Toowoomba Reddit community here, and the comments lead me down a rabbit hole, explaining that "Toowoomba Chicken" is a flavour based on "Toowoomba Pasta" which is a pasta that has recently become extremely popular in South Korea. The flavour was invented by Outback Steakhouse, an American restaurant chain that pretends to be Australian. They just made a random pasta, attached a random Australian name ("Toowoomba" in this case) to it, and it went surprisingly well. I've been told that Toowoomba pasta should be available to buy from my local asian grocer, so I'm going to have to buy some ASAP.