We ride the subway to get around in Seoul. We seem to get a lot of "street cred" for doing it -- apparently most visitors just use taxis -- but we find that it's faster and a lot less expensive to get around. (Plus, all the walking to-and-from stations helps maintain our girlish figure.)
We've even bought "T-money" cards -- stored value cards with RFID tags that we use to pay for rides. The system was explained to us by a young Korean-American man doing his compulsory Korean military service by working for the subway company.
The subways are wonderfully clean and efficient, and the signage is all in both Korean characters and "English" characters so it's easy to get around. Most platforms are open to the trains like we're familiar with in America (okay, not in Kansas...) but the more crowded ones have glass walls with doors that open only once the train is stopped in place.
The advertising is interesting. It almost always contains some English text, and probably 20% of the people pictured in the ads are not Korean.
One of the most striking things about riding the subway is that positively EVERYONE is using a mobile device of some kind. Korea has a parallel system of transmitters that send a TV signal to their cell phones using a different radio than the cellular one, so you see lots of devices with long antennas, and it seems that catching up on the latest sitcom or soccer game is the pass-the-time activity of choice.
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