Caveat: A brief sojourn aboard Starship Ilsan

I've written before about what a strange place Ilsan is.  I've compared it to a space-station, because of its modern artificiality.  I've described it as "Sim City" because of its regular and somewhat boring urban plan.  Its upper-middle-class, highly educated and "aspirational" demographics make it rather unique in my experience of Korean places, too. 

[broken link! FIXME] Ilsan 003 I went up over the weekend for a very brief visit to drop off my paperwork for my visa renewal with my new boss, for my new hagwon job that will start May 1.  I was walking around this strange place that feels like "home."  It's as different from Hongnong as Iowa is.  It's not even like the rest of Seoul, although I know there are other enclaves around Seoul, other "new cities," that resemble Ilsan.  But Ilsan seems unique because of its scale (more than half a million residents) and the vast regularity of its grid-like layout on basically flat land (in and of itself rather hard to find in Korea).  Manhattan-on-the-rice-paddy.

I had a new insight, on Saturday, as regards my own strange "destiny" with respect to Ilsan.  When I was young (a child) I would often draw maps of imaginary places.  Ilsan, in fact, has some rather striking resemblances to the kinds of "designed" or "engineered" places that I often tried to create, based on my rather utopian-yet-gritty (if that's possible), naive conception of urbanism – recall that I grew up in a small town and my relationship with cities was intense (I loved them even as a child) but limited (my parents did not love them). 

So my destiny, in Ilsan, lies only in that it resembles a kind of "city as I imagined it" as opposed to being a "real" city.  Perhaps this is also similar to (but not causally connected to) my strange feeling that Korean is a a "langauge as I imagined it" as opposed to a "regular" language, too.  Not to deny the fundamental, external reality of either the Korean language or of the city of Ilsan.  Just that they have certain striking predecessors in my imagination, and hence I feel a weird connection to them.

Now… if only I could "figure them out."

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