I returned to Sim City, today. Sim City? Every time I come back to Ilsan, now that I’ve lived other places and spent lots of time in other parts of South Korea, I realize just how untypical it is. It’s all organized. It’s extremely upper-middle-class. It’s got right angles and wide streets and trees planted in rows along them, and regularly placed schools, police stations, parks. Ilsan was designed by a guy playing Sim City.
This place was my home, for two years. I liked it here – partly, the kids were great students, because they all come from highly motivated, upwardly mobile families. Partly, it’s high density, easy to get around, convenient for a foreigner, without being so far from Seoul that it’s hard to get there. And to those who imagine coming to Korea to teach, I can recommend it as a “soft landing” – it’s kind of a cultural halfway between American suburban lifestyles and Korean urban lifestyles.
Here’s Ilsan-from-space, from Google Earth. The evenly-spaced white rectangles are all schools, with their matching, uniform schoolyards (I think this satellite photo was done when there was snow on the ground, hence the whiteness).
See all the perfect squares? My place of work was near the top center of this image. My apartment was just off the bottom center. My commute consisted of a two kilometer walk with only right-angle turns, of wide pedestrian esplanades with lots of trees and modernist public sculpture, and playing children on every side. Quite different from the Yeonggwang fish market behind the bus terminal, the busride through rice fields, Hongnong’s high street. Both have their charms, to be sure.
I decided to go to the Costco, at 백석 [baek-seok]. There are many Korean Costcos closer to my home (in fact, I’d bet that the Ilsan Costco is actually the one that is absolutely farthest from my home, given it’s about 15 km short of North Korean border), but I go to the one in Ilsan for two reasons: 1) I know exactly where it is, and it’s only 1 block from the subway station; 2) I like coming to Ilsan anyway, for nostalgia reasons, since I lived here in 2007-2009.
I never (literally NEVER) shopped at Costco in the US. I found it inconvenient, to have to be a member, and bargain-hunting, per se, is not my style of shopping. But I like Costco in Korea, because it’s one international retailer that makes very few concessions to local market differences. The consequence is that walking into a Costco in Ilsan is like teleporting to suburban Los Angeles – the ethnicity of the clientele is even roughly similar, although skewed differently. So it’s a chance to make a quick shopping trip back to the US, without the expensive airfare.
I shop at Costco for pants. Why? Because I have had bad experiences getting Korean-sized pants, even doing conversions. Costco puts the traditional (and irrational) American sizes right on them: I know if I pick up 34W30L jeans, they will fit, more or less.
In my 15 minutes in Costco, I heard the following things, all uttered by different children under 12 years old:
“eom-ma [mom], can we get this?”
“oh, cool!” – brother; “it’s stupid.” – sister.
“oh my god! they have THESE.”
So… the children in Ilsan’s Costco speak English. That makes sense. This is a place for Korea’s aspirational classes. But it’s a little bit disorienting to hear, after months out in the provincia.
