Google Maps in Korea?

After becoming acquainted late in life (I believe it was in late high school) to Korean food, I’m finally going to Korea this summer. I’m sure some people will label it our honeymoon, but Chris and I are just labeling it a trip to Korea. When we’re traveling internationally, we usually rely on Google Maps to get us around by foot and were confused when we tried to map several places at once in Seoul and kept getting our requests rejected. In addition, only driving directions were given; we couldn’t change the transport method to walking, which was odd. After further investigation, we found out that South Korea doesn’t allow full use of Google Maps, and when mapping, it will only give two points on the map and show driving directions… so no walking directions. This really didn’t make sense. So we did some more searches and found that Koreans in Korea use Naver to map directions, and it supposedly has Korean and English. Well, I downloaded Naver onto my phone to fruitlessly find that English was nowhere on it.. I even Google translated how to say English in Korean, and I still couldn’t find those characters.

In the end, Chris discovered that Bing Maps works quite well for Korea, and it’s pretty fast, too. I don’t think I’d ever been more excited about Bing in my life. Who would have thought that Bing would have saved the day (or our Korea trip)?

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