Day 53: Failing to Reach Heaven and Reaching The Kingdom

Today, August 13th, my friend and I wanted to visit some drama filming locations. The first one is what I call "Heaven," the garden where some heavenly scenes of You're Beautiful and 49 Days were filmed. It's quite a ways north of Seoul, around an hour's driving distance away from the border, and just taking a subway won't suffice. Our agenda was to take an hour subway north, then two buses thereafter. However, after the first bus ride, it was raining super hard and we were so lost, that we decided to head to the fictional mall "The Kingdom" from Master's Sun.

"The Kingdom" is really the mall Enter-6, which is located in Suwon, the city south of Seoul. This mall actually has four locations, three of which are in Seoul, but this is the Dongtan Metapolis Branch. So we traveled for over three hours from north of Seoul to south of Seoul. It's also a bit confusing to get here, but we took the subway Seodongtan Station (서동탄역) and a short bus ride from there, but the bus stop is far away...best not to get directions from me.

This mall is actually not as grand as the drama portrayed it to be (props to the drama for displaying the mall so beautifully!), but there are two buildings and a beautiful courtyard in between. There is also a futuristic sky bridge connecting Building A to Building B. Building B is where Master's Sun took place.

On the first floor, you'll find the European style fountain, a key landmark in the drama. There are four women as the centerpiece, and it lights up with various changing colors.

Also I think this is the location that Taeyang kept passing by, where the ghost garbage can guy would always sit on the bench. However, the bench was moved to the other side of the hallway, against a store instead of the railing, and the garbage can wasn't here. So this is kind of just speculation that this is the correct spot.

I forgot where this is, but it is just around the corner from this cat sculpture sitting on a nearby bench. There is also another one of these cat sculptures on another bench somewhere else in the mall.

Walking around the mall, we found several advertisements with Gong Hyo Jin for Hats On and Smoothie King! It's nice still seeing her around this mall, one way or another.

Afterwards we went to eat at a Japanese restaurant, Misoya, located on the fourth floor of Building B. Once seated, we saw all these framed autographs on the wall! Majority of them I didn't recognize, but there was one of the Running Man cast!

Walking throughout the mall, it was as if I were a customer walking around "The Kingdom." It was so cool to come to this filming site!