Lovely Runner | Banghwasuryujeong and Yongyeon Pond — The Bicycle Lesson

He teaches her to ride a bike. She already knows how — that is the joke, or half of it — and the lesson happens on the flat ground beside a pond called Yongyeon, under a pavilion called Banghwasuryujeong.

The pavilion is one of the finest buildings in Korea and almost nobody outside the country knows its name. It sits on a rock outcrop at the north-east corner of the Hwaseong wall, an irregular plan that reads differently from every angle, built in 1794 as a guard post and used from the start as a place to drink and look at the view. The pond below was dug at the same time. Dragon Head Rock and the pavilion both reflect in it, which is what people come for.

Lotus in summer, maples in autumn, and at night the pavilion lit above black water. It is a picnic spot — people bring mats and books and sleep in the afternoon, and there is a shop across the road that rents picnic kit.

Two minutes upstream from Hwahongmun, open all hours, free. It gets busy enough that finding somewhere to sit is genuinely hard on a good weekend.

Bring something to sit on and stay an hour. The reason this scene lands is that it is the one stretch of the drama where nobody is running anywhere or trying to prevent anything — and the pond has been used for exactly that, by whoever was in Suwon that day, for two hundred and thirty years.

Cover photo: Suwon Hwaseong, by Bernard Gagnon, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Fortress view, not the pavilion.