Ilsan Lake Park

The Better Half is taking a nail art class and there was an exhibition on nail art (and other beauty stuff) at the Kintex exhibition center, in Ilsan. Her teacher had encouraged the students to visit the exhibition. Ilsan is basically a suburb Northwest of Seoul and was originally planned to help with the housing problems in Seoul. There are other such satellite cities around Seoul, one of which is Bundang where we were at Chuseok.

Ilsan’s main claim to fame is Ilsan Lake Park, which, somewhat unsurprisingly, consists of a lake in a park. Not just any lake, mind you, this one is claimed to be the largest artificial lake in Asia. Now my understanding of either of “artificial lake” or “Asia” may be somewhat off the mark, but I have a hard time imagining there not being a larger lake behind some dam in China or Russia. My guess is that the artificial part here means that it really was somehow completely man-made, without there being a river to start with. The Han river that flows through Seoul is a little bit away from the Lake Park. I haven’t found any confirmation of what “artificial” is intended to mean in this context, but the photo below gives an idea of the size of the lake. It’s actually a bit elongated, so there’s a fair amount of lake both to the left and right of the photo.

Still, it was a very nice park. The Better Half was off to the exhibition and I was strolling in the park with the Kids. We discovered two play areas, a small island, and a cactus exhibition. One little negative side of the park was the lack of concessions, which became an issue in two cases, as in a suddenly developed urgent need for a toilet and in a possibly more urgent case of needing some ice cream. The first one is the reason we visited the cactus exhibition and the second one we were able to fulfill only after leaving the park. But it made for a very nice afternoon.

There was also some event where local farmers or other food producers were selling their stuff, but since none of them specialized in ice cream, we gave that part a miss. There were a few cows in that event as well, but they didn’t manage to hold the interest of the Kids for more than a minute or two.

In the evening, we visited The Better Half’s uncle who lives in Ilsan. I get along with him really well and the feeling seems to be mutual. In fact, as soon as I had heard that The Better Half would come to Ilsan for the exhibition, my first question was whether we could go visit the uncle. 🙂

We’ve only met three times, but we always have a very good time. I don’t know how much of that is due to the notorious chief of a famous tribe, The Great Boo, seeming to wake up from his sleeping-sickness-induced coma every time we meet, but we always have a great time. In case you’re not familiar with the Great Boo, here is an explanation, courtesy of Edmund Blackadder.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6F_egAM5vQ

You can find the rest of the episode on YouTube, I suppose.

To get home, we took a taxi. Going up to Ilsan we took the subway, but that takes about 1.5 hours door-to-door, so late in the evening with two very sleepy/sleeping kids, that was not really an option. The 33 km drive from Ilsan to our home cost us a measly 28800 KRW, i.e., about 20 Euros. The lousy 6 km drive from Helsinki airport to our home in Finland on a Saturday evening would cost me about the same. What are we doing wrong in Finland? Besides not having procreated enough to yield a sufficient population for building a good base for all kinds of services, that is.