Encounter|Siheung Gaetgol Ecological Park — Reeds Before the Transfer

Before Kim Jin-hyuk takes the Sokcho posting, Encounter sends the couple into a field of reeds that is not on the East Sea at all.

Siheung Gaetgol Ecological Park sits on the old Sorae salt flats at 287 Dongseo-ro. It is an inland tidal creek, a national wetland since 2012, with a 22-metre swaying observatory over glasswort and abandoned crystallizing ponds. In late 2018 the drama used the reed beds for the date that plays like a farewell. Cha Soo-hyun walks the boardwalk in a coat that does not belong to a salt marsh. Jin-hyuk already knows he is leaving Seoul.

The park is free and open through the day. Autumn is when the reeds match the broadcast. Couples started coming after the episode aired, which the tourism press noted at the time. You can still climb the observatory and look down on the same brown water the cameras treated as a last unhurried hour.

The transfer is the plot. The wetland is what the plot needed: a place large enough to hold two people who have already run out of ordinary city rooms.

Photo: restored Sorae salt pond inside the park, Lee Byong-uh, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons