Lovely Runner | Haenggung-dong Mural Village — The Walk Home

The walk between school and home is where this drama does most of its work — and in Haenggung-dong that walk goes through a mural village of eight themed alleys, painted over years by residents, artists and civic groups on the walls of houses that development rules had left alone. Sol pins Seon-jae to one of these walls. It is the most-searched frame in the series and it is also, in real life, somebody's exterior wall. That is the thing to hold onto here. The murals are public art in a residential neighbourhood, not an installation in a park. Visitors chasing addresses through these lanes have left notes saying as much — one, tracking down a house used by a different drama, wrote that it looked abandoned but that people live in the houses around it, so keep the noise down and come in daylight. That is exactly right, and it applies to the whole grid. So: walk the alleys, photograph the paintings, do not photograph into windows or courtyards, and do not go hunting for a specific door. There is no single mural that is *the* mural; the drama used several lanes, and the pleasure of the place is that you turn a corner and there is another one. The village runs into Haengnidan-gil at one end and the fortress wall at the other, so it slots into the same afternoon as everything else here. Turn off the main lane into a side alley with no murals at all. Washing on a line, a parked scooter, someone's chilli peppers drying. That is the neighbourhood the painted walls belong to, and it is the reason the walk home looked like a real walk home. Cover photo: Suwon Hwaseong wall, by VN.NguyenDucDuy, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Area view, not the mural village.