My Love from the Star | Petite France — The Kiss Under the Little Prince

Episode 15, broadcast 6 February 2014. The lamps come up across a hillside of blue-roofed cottages, and Do Min-joon crosses several hundred kilometres in an instant to stand in front of Cheon Song-yi. The park lists this drama first on its own filming page, which tells you how much of its business the scene built.

쁘띠프랑스 sits above Cheongpyeong Lake in Gapyeong, at 호반로 1063. It opened in 2008 as a Saint-Exupéry theme village — Little Prince statues on the lawns, a marionette hall, a collection of antique music boxes, and about a dozen buildings brought from Provence and rebuilt on a Korean hill. It has since merged with an Italian village next door and is sold on one combined ticket. Open 09:00 to 18:00, year round, free parking, paid entry.

None of it is trying to be authentic and none of it needs to be. The premise of the drama is a man from somewhere else living quietly in a place he does not belong to. A fake French village on a Korean lake is not a bad match for that.

Come in the last hour before closing, in winter if you can. The lamps switch on while the sky is still light, and for roughly ten minutes the square looks exactly the way it looks on television — which is the only condition under which any of these places ever do.