If you come as a tourist to South Korea Bring Cash

You can bring up to $10,000 cash per person. And if you want to actually do things here this might be a good idea.

I came to see my friend and to meet his new wife and baby. So, my purpose was mostly to do that rather than to do a lot of things. However, their idea was for us to do a lot of things and that is where we ran into problems.

The problem appears to be that Security microprocessor chips that Europe and South Korea and other places use in their ATM debit and credit cards are not used in most U.S. ATM debit and Credit cards and because of this most larger banks in Korea simply won't accept them for anything. This includes American Express Cards.

So, you are left with mostly 7-11 types of ATM machines which might give you $100 a day while you are here and charge you about $3.60 for that transfer. If you are really lucky you will find a Free standing ATM that will actually give you $300 a day like in the U.S.

So, if you don't bring enough cash per person on this journey likely you will be disappointed because you won't be able to pull out enough cash from ATM machines to do much at all while you are here.

I'm not disappointed at all because I came here to see my friend and his wife and his baby, so just being here with them I'm happy. But, we have all had to be very creative so we could do all the things they wanted to do while I'm here.

Also, they don't write checks here in South Korea and most things are done with either cash or cash wire transfers. So, anything you might expect to do in the U.S. with our banking system there you can't do here at least without security chips that all ATM and Credit Cards have here built into them.