Mr. Sunshine | Manhujeong, Andong — Let's Do Love

"합시다, 러브." Let's do love. Eugene Choi and Go Ae-sin stand at either end of a small stone bridge over a mountain stream and agree to something neither of them can name in Korean, and the line went into the language.

The bridge is at Manhujeong, a scholar's pavilion in Giran-myeon, Andong. Kim Gye-haeng built it after being impeached for opposing the tyrant Yeonsangun and withdrawing here to live out of sight — which is a fair description of what the pavilion is for. It is genuinely tiny, big enough for perhaps two people, above a valley and a waterfall.

Practicalities matter here more than most. It is roughly a ten-minute uphill walk from the car park, on a forest path. Entry is 1,000 won at a booth on the way up, cards accepted. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays, ten to five. You cannot go inside the pavilion — which means most visitors pay nothing and lose nothing.

Queues form at the bridge for photographs, and the advice from people who have done it is unanimous: arrive before ten, and bring someone, because the shot requires two. Autumn is the season. Fire came through the area recently and the traces are visible.

Walk past the bridge and up to the waterfall, which almost nobody does. The scene works because two people who cannot say the word in their own language borrow a foreign one to say it — and this is a pavilion built by a man who came here specifically to stop having to explain himself.

Cover photo: Andong, by 안동시, KOGL Type 1, via Wikimedia Commons. Regional view, not the pavilion.