Reply 1988 | Uijeongbu Hall of Arts — The Concert They Both Missed

Episode eighteen. A Lee Seung-hwan concert, two tickets, and the single most agonising near-miss in the series — Deok-seon and Jung-hwan in the same building, minutes apart, neither knowing. The building is the Uijeongbu Hall of Arts, which opened in 1999 and is therefore eleven years too modern for the scene it plays. That did not matter, because what the sequence needed was a concert-hall foyer big enough for two people to lose each other in, and this one has it: a wide lobby, several levels, and the geometry to make a miss feel plausible rather than contrived. It is a working regional arts centre with a full programme — orchestral, musical theatre, and free exhibitions in the gallery spaces. The lobby and gallery are open without a ticket, and staff are relaxed about people wandering in. If you want the real version of the scene, book something. Anything. It sits ten minutes' walk from Uijeongbu Station on Line 1, which makes it the most easily reached location in this drama by a wide margin — and worth knowing that Uijeongbu, not Ssangmun-dong, was where most of this show was actually made. Stand in the foyer during the interval, when it fills up and everybody is looking for somebody. The scene works because a crowd is the only place where being in the same room as a person you love means nothing at all. Cover photo: Uijeongbu, by Yann Michel Cueroni, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. City view, not the venue.