In Seoul, the exit number is the address: reading the subway's numbered doors

When someone in Seoul tells you where to meet, they rarely give a street name. They give a number — Exit 6, by the newsstand. Above ground, the city locates itself by the subway 출구 (chulgu, exit), and the exit number does the work an address would do anywhere else. Learn to read it and the map folds flat; ignore it and you spend your first week ten minutes late to everything.

The exits are numbered, not named

Every station rings itself with exits counted in sequence — 1, 2, 3, around the block. A quiet stop may have four. The big ones run into the double digits: Gangnam Station (강남역, Gangnamyeok) on Line 2 counts twelve, each opening onto a different stretch of a road eight lanes wide. The number is printed large on yellow signage, in Korean and English, and it is the first thing a local will ask you — 몇 번 출구 (myeot beon chulgu), which exit. The answer is treated as an address, because functionally it is one: Sinsa Station (신사역) Exit 8 means the mouth of Garosu-gil (가로수길), the same way another city would name a corner.

The numbering follows the platform, not the street, so it can feel arbitrary until you accept that you are meant to memorise the door, not deduce it. Exit 9 at Hongik University Station (홍익대학교, shortened to 홍대입구역, Hongdae-ipgu) is the one that spills into the bars and buskers; Exit 6 at Myeongdong Station (명동역) on Line 4 lands you in the middle of the cosmetics-shop crush. Regulars quote these from memory the way they'd quote a phone number.

Choosing wrong costs you

Pick the wrong exit at a station straddling a wide road and there is no shortcut across. You walk back down the stairs, under the traffic, and up the far side — ten minutes gone, sometimes more if you have to re-tap through the gates. That last part matters: on a T-money card (티머니) the base subway fare is around 1,400 won for the first ten kilometres, and stepping back inside the paid zone to reach the correct exit can cost you a fresh tap. Before the turnstiles, overhead boards list every exit with the landmarks above it — a department store, a hospital, a hotel, a bank. Read them before you tap out, not after.

Interchanges punish guesswork hardest. Express Bus Terminal (고속터미널역), where Lines 3, 7 and 9 meet, is less a station than a small labyrinth; the same is true of Jamsil (잠실역) on Lines 2 and 8, whose Exit 1 and Exit 2 feed straight into the base of Lotte World Tower. At these, the difference between two adjacent exits can be a fifteen-minute detour around a block you can't cut through.

The underground city between the exits

At the biggest interchanges the exits are stitched together by 지하상가 (jihasangga), underground arcades you can cross without ever surfacing. Beneath Express Bus Terminal, Goto Mall (고투몰) runs roughly six hundred metres of florists, clothing racks and socks-by-the-dozen — you can walk it from one line to another and come up a different exit entirely, dry in the rain and out of the summer heat. Euljiro 3-ga (을지로3가) and Gangnam knit similar warrens below the pavement. The practical upshot: when the exit you want sits across a brutal road, check whether an arcade connects to it underground before you climb into the weather.

These passages keep station hours, not shop hours. The trains themselves start around 05:30 and the last one clears most lines close to midnight, so an arcade that felt like a shortcut at nine can be a row of shuttered grilles by half past eleven — a fine covered path, but no longer a lit one.

The board by each exit

At street level, most exits carry a local map fixed to the wall — the block above, drawn building by building, with your exit marked as the fixed point. Match the name on your reservation to the map before you climb, and you arrive facing the right way instead of spinning on the pavement with your phone. The maps are oriented to where you're standing, which is more than your phone's compass manages in a canyon of towers.

That last point is not a small one. Google's walking directions barely function inside Korea — the country restricts the export of detailed mapping data, so the blue line stalls and the arrow drifts. Locals navigate on Naver Map (네이버 지도, Naver Jido) or KakaoMap (카카오맵), both of which route in English and, crucially, tell you which exit number to take. Set your destination in one of those and it will end the instruction the way a Seoulite would: get off here, leave by that door.

Getting it right the first time

The move is simple and worth making a habit. Before you travel, look up the venue in Naver Map or KakaoMap rather than Google, and note the exit number it gives you — it will be a number, every time. On the platform, follow the yellow overhead signs toward that exit while you're still underground; the corridors are long, and choosing early saves you a reverse march. Load a T-money card at any convenience store or the machines by the gates so a mistaken tap-out costs pocket change, not a scramble for coins.

The one mistake to avoid: treating the exits as interchangeable because they share a station name. They don't share a street. At a place like Gangnam or Jamsil, Exit 3 and Exit 11 can be a genuine quarter-mile and one impassable road apart. Get the number before you go, trust it over your phone's arrow, and the numbered door becomes exactly what the city treats it as — the most reliable address you have.

지하철 출구 번호는 서울에서 가장 정확한 주소다.