Customer Reviews

Wallpaper City Guide: Seoul

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As one of the many expats living the surrounding area of Seoul, I can appreciate the suggestions that this book makes, specifically with regard to the urban life and the focus on the areas of the city that emphasize the art scene. However, the fact that I am able to find this book helpful at all, is only based on the fact that I go to Seoul often and am confident navigating around the city.

This book is NOT for someone just visiting the city for a long weekend or even a couple of weeks. There are three main reasons for this.

First, this book fails to divide the city into districts. This is an absolute necessity in a travel guide about a city with 10 million people. It is huge. You can look at the subway map and count how many stops from one place to the next. Just because there are only 6 stops, doesn't mean you'll get there in 10 minutes. Making 6 stops on the subway with 2 transfers between lines could take you almost an hour. If you are in Seoul, you should pick an area of the city you want to see and stick in that area for a while, instead of wasting time getting from one part of the city to another part.

Second, this book does not give detailed explanations of how to get from place to place. It does not have the address written in Korean, it only has the address in English. Also, it doesn't tell you how to get there. There is no explanation for what subway stop to get off at, what bus to take, nothing.

Third, the book gives you no idea of how much each of the suggested venues cost. For example, N Seoul Tower has an entrance fee of 7,000won per person that the book fails to mention. Also, there is no price range given for all of the restaurants and bars it suggests. If you spent an hour trying to find the one cool cafe you saw in the book's picture, and got there, only to find out there was no way you were going to drop that much money on a roll of sushi, you would be very frustrated and disappointed.

Overall, this book is decent for a local person who has a plethora of time to explore it's suggestions, but bad for a visitor who could just save their time and buy the Lonely Planet Seoul guide instead.

I love this series of books and have found other to be helpful in navigating a city but the Wallpaper guide to Seoul somehow manages to sterilize the city. For example when using the guide to Copenhagen i went to nearly every spot listed in the book and found amazing and unique places that i would never have known of otherwise. The majority of the Seoul guide's content was either vastly out of my budget or simply didn't look interesting. At least it looks nice in the company of others on my bookshelf.

This book is half photos, and it's a book more about upscale style, modernism, and architecture of Seoul. Perhaps that's what all Wallpaper Guides are about, but this was my first one and it will be my last. 101 pages minus roughly 50 pages of pictures leaves ~50 pages of content. Only three quarters of each page are used for text, although many of the pictures have additional blurbs. Overall, it's as if a photographer wrote the book instead of a traveler. I found this book utterly useless as a travel guide.