Lovely Runner | Haengnidan-gil — The First Date That Fit on One Street

Haengnidan-gil is a short run of Hwaseomun-ro dressed as if it had always been a date. Renovated hanok, dessert shops, a walnut bakery VisitKorea still names when it sends people here. The street sits inside Haenggung-dong, between Hwaseomun and the old fortress wall, and it is smaller than the nickname. You walk it in a few minutes if nobody stops you.

Lovely Runner put Sun-jae and Sol on this pavement for their first turn through 2008. He found her food. She walked like someone who already knew the ending and was pretending not to. The shops change owners. The width of the lane does not. Korea Tourism Organization mapped the street as the opening move of a 790-metre pilgrimage that ends at a pavilion over a pond.

Come in the afternoon if you want the same light the series used. The fortress is a block away. The cafe that played Sol's house is a turn off the main run. What you take from the street is the scale: two people, one lane, enough room to miss each other and still collide.

Photo: Hwaseong Haenggung at the edge of the same neighborhood, Tungdangthanh, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.