Extraordinary Attorney Woo | Deoksugung Stone Wall Road — The Breakup Legend, Debunked

There is a superstition that couples who walk the Deoksugung stone wall road will break up. Korean couples repeat it, half believe it, and detour. In episode ten, Woo Young-woo walks it with Lee Jun-ho and takes the legend apart on the spot: the family court used to sit at the end of this road, so for decades the people seen coming down it were people on their way to divorce. The path did not cause anything. It just had a courthouse at one end.

That is the most in-character thing she does all series. Not romance despite the omen — romance by dismantling the omen with a fact.

The path runs along the grey perimeter wall of Deoksugung and continues into Jeongdong-gil, past a Methodist church from 1897, the Seoul Museum of Art, and a run of embassies. A few hundred metres, and the traffic noise drops away within thirty of them. It is central Seoul's default filming walk — Park Eun-bin herself had already shot here for Do You Like Brahms? — and if you have a memory on this Blox from another drama, it is the same stone.

Come in the second half of November. The ginkgos along Jeongdong-gil turn and drop and the path goes ankle-deep in yellow against the dark wall. City Hall Station Exit 1, then keep the wall on your right.

Walk the whole length and out the far end, and you will pass the site the legend was actually built on. Woo Young-woo was right, which is the point: most of the things people are afraid of turn out to be a filing address.

Cover photo: Deoksugung, by Sk.seo17, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.