Encounter|Malecón, Havana — The Sunset She Almost Slept Through

Cha Soo-hyun had a sleeping pill and a hotel bed waiting. Then she walked out to the wall instead.

The Malecón is eight kilometres of poured concrete between Havana and the Florida Strait, a seawall that locals use as a bench, a fishing pier, and an evening room. In the first episode of Encounter, the heiress who runs Donghwa Hotel comes here on a Cuba site visit she never meant to enjoy. The light drops. A young man with a camera and a year of saved wages is already on the stones. Kim Jin-hyuk does not know who she is. That is the point of the scene.

tvN shot the meeting on this esplanade in autumn 2018, the first Korean drama to film a full location unit in Cuba. Castillo del Morro sits on the harbour mouth to the east. The Hotel Nacional holds the hill to the west. Between them the wall takes spray when a north wind is up, and couples still sit where the two of them sat, watching the same line of water.

Stand on the parapet at the hour the cameras used. The city is behind you. The Gulf is in front. The drama needed a place that made a scheduled life look suddenly optional. The Malecón still does that without a script.

Photo: l k m (Flickr), CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons