My Love from the Star | Incheon National University — The Lecture Hall That Drew Ten Thousand Fans a Year

Do Min-joon teaches here, badly and beautifully, to a hall of students who have no idea he was watching their great-great-grandparents. Cheon Song-yi enrols in his class purely to be near him and behaves in it like a person who has never been a student. The campus is 인천대학교 송도캠퍼스, at 아카데미로 119 in Yeonsu-gu — Incheon National University's Songdo campus, opened in 2009 on reclaimed land as part of the Songdo international district. Glass, water features, wide plazas, everything under twenty years old. Korean press documented eleven filming spots across it. What happened next is the part worth recording. From 2014 roughly ten thousand Chinese visitors a year came to walk those spots, at the height of the drama's extraordinary reception in China, and the university printed Chinese-language pamphlets to route them. A public university found itself running a tour operation it had never asked for. It is free and open. Walk in from 인천대입구역 on Incheon Line 1. There is nothing marked. The boom faded, the pamphlets stopped being printed, and the lakeside path is now just a path that students cross between classes without knowing what was shot on it. That is the ordinary ending of a filming location, and it is a better one than being preserved.