Someone's Never Played SimCity

I don't think there is such a thing as a zoning law in Seoul. It seems that if you own the land and have funds at least to begin building something, no matter what it is, you can. There is a mega-church under construction that has been, according to a colleague, under construction for close to two years. They ran out of money and the site sat dormant and half-done for about a year and just recently came back to life. This is wholly contrary to the typical layout in the U.S. where mega-churches are out in the suburbs. Here there is within the same square half-mile: proto-mega-church, apartment colonies, stores, outdoor vendors, a truck driving school, small farms, hagwons, schools, and a mountain.

I passed a sheer cliff down from a sidewalk that was actually a staircase into a subterranean shoe store. I would have taken a photo but was uncertain of whether that was polite. This, and other stores and vendors, just sprout up out of the sidewalk. The distribution of stores, restaurants, and street vendors is very unexpected. In most of the places I have lived there are specific districts and streets that, because of habit or zoning, are the center of commerce. It seems that here you simply have to have a wander two blocks in any direction from any point of origin and you'll hit someone selling something. One time out of two it'll be something fried.

Probably strangest of all, to me, are the gardens. There are small orchards and gardens distributed on any small patch of land not already paved. I assume that this is partly what fuels the vegetable sellers that set up shop everywhere. The last bit of evidence that there isn't a great deal of delineation of function within the geography of the city is that the trash can end up a variety of places. There is a designated recycling day but instead of having specified bins all manner of objets, including used hula-hoops and broken computers and so forth, are hauled into the parking lot and onto the curb here. Old furniture is ditched, whenever the whim strikes, in the yards of our apartments. It is either liberated by people who want it (there's a constant effort by my coworkers to keep an eye out for useful furniture) or taken away by a mysterious force.