Reading a Korean address: the road, the number, and the floor above it

The map pin lands and you are standing on it, and the place is not there. No door with the right name at eye level — just a convenience store, a stairwell, and a column of backlit signs going up five floors. In a Korean city the address gets you to the building. The rest of it is vertical, and it is written on that column.

The road names itself by size

The legal standard is doromyeong juso (도로명주소), the road-name address, and the suffix is a measurement rather than a flourish. A 대로 (daero) is an artery of eight lanes or more; a 로 (ro) is the two-to-seven-lane road feeding it; a 길 (gil) is the small street branching off that. Seeing Yeonhui-ro 11-gil instead of Yeonhui-ro tells you, before you look up from the screen, whether to expect bus stops or a florist and a parked scooter.

Numbers count in twenty-metre steps

Building numbers are not assigned in order of construction. They begin at the start of the road and advance by one roughly every twenty metres, odd on the left, even on the right. So 45 and 46 face each other across the asphalt, and the distance from 12 to 30 is about three hundred metres — worth knowing when a taxi leaves you at the wrong end and you have to decide whether to walk it.

The last line is a floor

Korean buildings stack tenants. A tattoo studio on four, a study café on three, a dentist on two, a fried chicken place in 지하 (jiha), below ground, often the busiest address in the building. 층 (cheung) means floor, so 3층 is the third. The sign column outside is the directory, and for many of these places it is the only listing that exists.

Street level is only the first line of the address.

간판 기둥은 층 순서대로 쌓여 있으니, 주소 끝의 층수부터 확인하면 된다.