My Lovely Sam Soon|N Seoul Tower — The Stairs Kim Sun-a Still Photographs

Twenty years after the finale, Kim Sun-a posted a photograph of the Namsan stairs and wrote that it was July, and Namsan. The last frames of My Lovely Sam Soon put Sam-soon and Jin-heon on those steps and on the cable-car slope below the tower. The kiss that closed a 50-percent-rated Wednesday night still lives in the same concrete.

N Seoul Tower itself is the 236-metre needle on the ridge. The pilgrimage is not the observation deck. It is the walk up from the upper cable-car station, the landings where the city drops away, and the stairs fans still call Sam-soon’s. The mountain has been Seoul’s cheap date since before either of them existed. The drama only named a flight of steps.

You do not need a ticket for the stairs. You need lungs and a clear evening. The tower lights come on whether you remember the line about loving as if it were the last day or not. What you take away is smaller than the view: a public staircase that a pastry chef and a hotel heir once used as if it belonged to them, and that still belongs to whoever walks it after dinner.