My Lovely Sam Soon|Namsan Cable Car — Three Minutes Over Myeong-dong

In episode two Hyun Jin-heon is already on the line when Kim Sam-soon steps into a Namsan cabin. She is not being romantic. She is stalling a man who has just hired her as a pastry chef and asked her to pretend she is his girlfriend. The car leaves the Hoehyeon platform, hangs over Sogong-ro, and takes the three minutes the line has taken since 1962.

The lower station still sits where the mountain meets Myeong-dong. The upper station still dumps you a short walk from N Seoul Tower. The cabins still crawl at a little over three metres a second. What the 2005 cameras caught was ordinary Seoul weather through scratched glass — cicadas, summer green, a city that had not yet grown the later towers.

Sam-soon talks too much. Jin-heon does not. The view does the rest of the work. Later episodes will send them back to these slopes for the ending, but this first ride is the contract beginning in public, with the city underneath them and no one in the next cabin required to care.

Stand at the lower platform and you can still watch the same boxes climb the same 138 metres. The line is older than the drama by four decades. The drama only taught a generation which window to look out of.