{"id":54,"date":"2013-05-02T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-02T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yule-tide.generalsemiotics.net\/index.php\/2013\/05\/02\/post-47-one-night-in-april-of-2009-pt-2-the-wild-neon-yonder\/"},"modified":"2013-05-02T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-05-02T00:00:00","slug":"post-47-one-night-in-april-of-2009-pt-2-the-wild-neon-yonder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/2013\/05\/02\/post-47-one-night-in-april-of-2009-pt-2-the-wild-neon-yonder\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-47: One Night in April of 2009 (Pt. 2): The Wild Neon Yonder"},"content":{"rendered":"
\nNOTE:<\/strong> I am writing my memories of the night I arrived in Korea in 2009.
<\/span>These memories are vivid, even as I sit here in the spring of 2013, four years later.<\/span><\/em>\n<\/div>\n
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\nThis is a follow-up to:<\/font>
<\/span>Part I: “A Pig Virus Delays My Arrival“<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/strong><\/a><\/font>\n<\/div>\n
[Simple synopsis of Part I<\/a>: Late arrival due to Swine-Flu inspection; I find the woman waiting to pick me up]<\/font><\/div>\n
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\nPart II<\/u>: Into the Wild Neon Yonder<\/font><\/strong><\/font><\/font>
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<\/span>I was relieved. I’d found the woman without problem. I exchanged some dollars for Korean won. We went out. I didn’t<\/em> rent a phone. I didn’t yet know I could<\/em> rent a phone at the airport, and I couldn’t have known that I wouldn’t be able to otherwise get<\/em> a phone in my name until I had my Alien Registration Card (ARC), and I couldn’t have known that the ARC would be a while in coming. It was late June before I got a phone. I was phoneless quite a while.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Back on the evening of April 29th, 2009, though, I was too busy being amazed by things to care about all that.<\/p>\n

So many things amazed me. One thing especially stands out clearly in my mind’s eye: The cars in the parking lot all seemed to have retractable side-view mirrors — that is, the mirrors folded-in automatically when the car turned off. Amazing<\/em>, I thought. I concluded that it must be because space is at such a premium in Korea (being that South-Korea is the size of Indiana and something like 75% mountainous, as I later learned). I remarked to Melinda that the cars in the USA didn’t have automatically-retracting side mirrors. She seemed puzzled. \n<\/div>\n

<\/span>\"Picture\"<\/a>Walking off the plane in April of 2009,
I thought that most Korean automobiles
would be something like this. \/ (From here<\/a>)<\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n

There was another “big” car-related surprise to me, which I mean literally. That is, the cars in this parking lot were big<\/em>. I mean, they were approximately equal in size to cars in the USA. This surprised me. Cars in Germany were much smaller than American cars, on average, I remembered.<\/p>\n

I really thought Korea would be filled with those narrow trucks (like the one I found at right) and the like. I thought most cars would resemble the Hyundai Pony<\/a>. In hindsight, this seems truly naive, to the point of stupidity: Didn’t I know South-Korea was now among the richest countries on Earth? In defense of my 2009-self: Okay, South-Korea is rich, but Germany is even richer, and Germans’ cars are generally on the small side, as I remember clearly.<\/div>\n

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Melinda, the recruiter’s assistant (and my defacto chauffeur), had a satellite navigation system in her car. This also amazed me. “They are years ahead of us”<\/em>, I thought. My dad may have already had one, too, by that point, but he treated it as a novelty and would not have relied on it. It appeared to me that Melinda used it daily. \/ During the course of the subsequent four years, I have wavered between this “they are years ahead of us” view and a much more negative view, namely that Koreans may just be plain-old suckers (moreso than Westerners) for the latest flashy, shiny “conspicuous-consumption” gadgets, for status. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between, I guess.<\/p>\n

We were racing along, and stopped for gas at one point. The attendant asked, gesturing at me, “Who’s that?”<\/em> (or so Melinda translated). I was surprised to see gas station attendants at all, a rare sight in today’s USA.<\/p>\n

The <\/span>car navigation system spoke to Melinda steadily, giving directions. Our destination: Ilsan<\/a><\/strong>, my home for the next year. Writing from the vantage point of 2013, it’s a place I have fond memories of, though actually living through it was often tough for me. <\/p>\n

<\/span>Ilsan is one of South-Korea’s “New Cities”, which went from rice-fields in 1990 to a more-or-less integral part of the Seoul megalopolis by 2010, when I lived there. It’s northwest of Seoul. Much, or most, of it is closer to the DMZ than to central-Seoul. <\/p>\n

Below is a google-map of Ilsan. <\/span>If you are reading this and have an interest in orienting yourself, to follow along with this meandering narrative, zooming in and out would help. The airport is far off to the southwest. The red-marker is anchored on a park area in central Ilsan, not far from where I lived. <\/span><\/span>Zooming in, this park connects Jeongbal Hill (forested, to the east) with Ilsan’s Lake Park (to the west). Now, in Korean and Chinese, “Il-San” means “one mountain” or “one hill”. I tried for a long time, in vain, to figure out if Jeongbal Hill was that “one”. No one ever seemed to know. My friend Jared, who knows many things like this, had another idea about it referring to a different specific hill, but I’ve forgotten which.
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