Day 382: Welcome To SimCity

No work today! It's Tuesday, and another random Korean national holiday thrown into mid-week! Gotta love 'em, eh? ;-)

Today is Indepence Movement Day, and celebrates when the Koreans rose up against Japanese occupation and caused a big ruckus cause they were tired of being oppressed and marginalized on their own homelands. I spent the day relaxing with my friends here in Ilsan.

I went to LaFesta to meet up with Addie & Katie and we did some CD shopping (I finally got my hands on the new Michael Buble CD!) and then had coffee at Starbucks. After that we went for a really nice walk around Lake Park. Lake Park is a very large park (well, at least large by Asian standards) at the southern boundary of Ilsan and has a good sized man-made lake in the middle. It's probably the nicest park I've seen in Korea, and Ilsan's actually a little bit famous for it.

It's quite pretty, but like most of these new master-planned instant 'just add concrete' satellite cities, has a very artificial feel to it. Living in Ilsan actually feels a lot like living in SimCity. The same chains of stores can be seen on every single corner, and the landscape is covered in rows up on rows of identical high-rise apartment towers. It was like a giant just swept in, clicked the mouse and draaaaaged it across the landscape. Boom! Instant community for half a million people, all living in buildings that come in only one of three or five styles and colours. Uh-oh! The citizens are demanding a park! We better build one! Plop! Down comes Lake Park, with its perfect winding pathways, neat and clean gardens, tasteful public art placed here and there, and requisite children's playgrounds every few hundred metres, and there you have it. Clean and organized and pretty, yet sterile, synthetic, and lacking in anything original, 'organic', or soulful. Just the way the Koreans like it.

As an urban planning junkie, life here in this massive come-to-life computer game is very surreal at times. And you really do have to see it to believe it. Hmmm...I should take some pictures to show you guys. It's certainly unlike anything we have back in North America. The SimCity creators would have a field day here!