Saju cafés in Seoul: what happens inside, and how to get read in English

What the room is like

Usually a small table, a drink included in the price, and a reader with either a well-thumbed almanac (만세력) or a laptop. You give your birth date, time and place; they cast your chart and talk you through it.

A session typically runs 20 to 40 minutes, and prices commonly sit in the tens of thousands of won — verify before you sit down, since specialised readings cost more. Districts around Hongdae, Insadong and Apgujeong have clusters of them.

What to bring

Very little, but the details matter more than people expect:

• Your birth date, and your birth time as precisely as you can get it
• Your birth city — needed for the solar time correction if you weren’t born in Korea
• A specific question. “Tell me about myself” gets you a general reading; “should I change jobs this year” gets you the timing tools
• Cash, at smaller places

The language problem

Most readers work in Korean, and saju vocabulary is dense even for Korean speakers — a session in a second language often turns into a translation exercise that eats the time you paid for.

Some venues advertise English readings, and a Korean-speaking friend makes an enormous difference. Failing that, arriving with your chart already computed and understood is the single best preparation: you can then spend the session on interpretation instead of on data entry.

Going in prepared

Read your own chart first. Know your Day Master, your element balance, and which decade you’re currently in, and you’ll be able to follow a Korean reader far better — and notice immediately if a reader’s chart doesn’t match yours, which happens more often than you’d hope when birth times are handled casually.