I've been describing this drama as 'startling', though I'd be hard pressed to describe why exactly. I've also watched it twice through, myself. The scene where she's talking to Busan Film Festival Guy and he's abruptly not there was certainly startling.

This show prompted me to look up a couple Hong Sang-soo indi films that I haven't yet seen to watch this weekend. 'The Novelist's Film' and 'The Day After' are queue'd-up.

Thanks @dramaddictally for your lovely recaps. Only completed two eps as I promised myself I would go slowly through this show so as to appreciate the tonal accuracy of each scene. Now I want to watch the next two in a big gulp. Episode 4 sounds like Thanksgiving dinner with Trumpy relatives.
This show renewed my faith in K-dramas after too many darkness-filled plots peopled with characters displaying the worst aspects of human nature.

the opposite of cute is ominous. think about it. cute things attract, ominous repel.

Don't get me wrong, I'm usually the first in line for anything French, but leave it to the French to come up with a concept like "dromomania." This show sounds like a Kdrama encapsulation of a Sartrean existential story, or perhaps even a fictionalized excerpt from one of his "Being and Nothingness" diatribes. I get it, but it requires a deep sense of spiritual ennui to be relatable, and I'm not really in that place. It's going on my list, just for one of those moods.

Thanks for the weecap @dramaddictally, I loved this mini series too. The bite sized episodes said so much. I was desperately looking for a common theme was it the presence of the sea, mindful eating and drinking that makes us acknowledge what we are tasting, the gorgeous sunsets, the multiple sides to people? The jury is still out, but I feel by the end we will see a common thread.

I love the way they end by introducing the essence of the character in the next episode.

When the women were watching the sunset in the first episode I was pulled out of the moment as I suddenly went from thinking ‘it’s so pretty’ to ‘don’t linger too long, remember you still need to get off the mountain before it gets dark’. As I caught myself thinking this, I wondered how often we miss out of the joy of the moment because of the ‘keep it moving’ mentality.

The randomness of the man in the third one left me with a big question mark over my head. How did they became separated when they had been standing still? They had very different experiences of the same moment but both felt the other had disappeared on them. His not showing up at all was a disappointment. I pictured him over sleeping and running in late or that they missed each other when she kept moving from one place to another as they had not been specific about the meeting point.

It was interesting that when they both intentionally looked for a wheat noodle restaurant in Seoul they found that it had been there all along. I have noticed for a while now just how specific the menus are for restaurants in Korea as people often look for a Blood sausage place, a wheat noodle place etc.

His demonstration of the keep bumping into each other doorway dance was an eye opener, I have often wondered how they choreograph it to look so natural as the first time makes sense but the second and third doesn’t ever happen in real life. It almost felt like he was trying to evoke her presence by doing that. But, I also wondered if he does that every time he goes through a restaurant door anyway and she was unfortunate to get caught in the trap of calculated connectedness. As when he said what’s the opposite of cute I suddenly thought of meet cute as unexpected randomness and then the opposite would be calculated and what if he was in fact a stalker. I dismissed it as being traumatised by the uniquely K drama mismatched genres but then the restaurant door moment brought it back to mind. I do think I have been impacted by K dramas into involuntary reactions to certain scenes, the key one being someone crossing a road, I immediately expect a truck of doom. It’s only when I watch Japanese or Chinese drama road crossing scenes that I know I can relax.

I do think this is short story telling at its best. I almost feel there needs to a special category of award for these types of dramas. They are either short form like this and the KBS specials that tell one story per episode or a short series like Finland papa.

Wee I love this, it is pretty, stylist, and contemplative, yet still light weight. I love Lee Na-young's wardrobe (❁´◡`❁)

Ep.3: Do not attempt with Fate! Ha ha ha it doesn't work that way, if you really want it make an appointment and schedule it. Ha ha

Ep.4: Aww crying on the bus for no reason, have been there, done that. Life is hard, I know. 🥺

The scenery is beautiful. The rest is bothersome. Well, at least for the first two episodes. Masochism may lead me to the others. Or not.
I do love this premise so much. Wandering around and meeting new people in ordinary circumstances. Reminds me of one of my favorite movies, The Straight Story.

However, while the movie makes every second meaningful, here it is the opposite. Things happen, but we never really find out what drama wants to do or say.
The teacher wants to be nice and say and do kind things but we don't know exactly why. Being nice is great, as long is not just the easiest choice. We don't know this FL. In ep 2 for instance, is she afraid of being honest or is she just thinking it is better to be supportive? If she isn't going to say anything why drama makes such a big deal of the supposed low quality of the work?

It is almost as if she doesn't care at all, and all this places and people are in a zoo she is visiting for the day. She comes, she finds them amusing, she leaves. It's disturbing to use such heartfelt premise in such a cynical manner.

@dramaddictally Your review is wonderful and captured the beauty of the series. Loved reading it.

I immediately knew the drama was for me as soon as the camera cut from the flying plastic cover to the train journey. In my POV, I feel anyone facing an existential crisis can relate to the protagonist, especially the dialogues in the 4th episode were she feels alone and the grandpa points out that she is single and doesn't know much about life because she doesn't have kids.

Even though the episodes can at times be hard hitting with simple conversations or dialogues, at the end of each episode a breeze of calmness washes over us instead of a sense of foreboding.

Based on the rave review of @dramaadictally and the response of three of the smartest commentators on dramabeans, @jossie4cheryl, @mikey and @reply1988 I watched these four episodes while I was on the exercise bike late this afternoon. Obviously, that is not the ideal format for this intellectually ambitious drama. Usually I watch shows like Taxi Driver, where seeing Lee Je-hoon beat up 25 thugs singlehandedly is an appropriate adrenaline rush and makes me pedal faster.

Now that I’ve seen it through my sweat, though I have a few things to say. I’m apologize to Drama Beans commentators that I’m going to default to my pretentious “scholarly” mode of discourse. My interpretation is not going to be any better than anyone elses, but I’ll be sure to write in a less comprehensible way, to make it sound more profound.

The best part of this drama for me is the different places and how they are filmed. It makes me travelling with her, I like this feeling. The last year, I went to see a play "Winter in Sokcho", so it was nice to see the place.

Now the different encounters are kinda weird. And I I wish we learn more about her.

I don't know what they were watching in Busan, but it really didn't make want to watch it. But I liked the Satie music. He wrote weird indications to play it, so I guess it matched this kind of story.

Talk about a pure slice-of-life series. Episode 1 has many symbolic elements of a society hidden in plain sight in nature. Park Ha-Kyung (Lee Na-Young) teaches Korean literature at a high school. To escape her ordinary days, Park Ha-Kyung decides to take one day trips on Saturdays. Lee’s dress and look is plain which suits her journey of discovery of herself. She is smart but introverted; practical but a dreamer. Her day trip to the temple brings her in contact with many odd but normal people who want to get to know her, but she quietly moves aside to be alone. She seems to have an instinctual wanderlust to remove herself from her mundane life in Seoul. Everyone who has the urge to travel, go out to the park, hike in the forest can relate to Ha-Kyung. Silent Jung-A takes Ha-Kyung, now a lost soul in the forest, on a simple but close interaction with nature that climaxes at sunset on top of a pile of rumble that is cathartic.

Episode 2 reinforces the fact that teachers can have profound influence on their students. But they may only reach one a year. Artists by nature stray off the normal path. Yeon-joo has a few strange friends in the small town where she has settled to foster her art. Her first exhibition could have gone badly as her friends speak the cruel truth at times, but Ha-Kyung stays true to her principle of helping her students find their dreams while she starts to awaken her own.

I found Episode 3 interesting because it connected Ha-Kyung’s surprising tarot scene with the title “Meta-Romance.” She continued to think about the prospect of meeting someone soon. Soon, a vivid daydream emerged repeating her own thoughts. Meta-fictional is fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions (esp. naturalism) and traditional narrative techniques.
I found this episode an unconventional introspection of a woman who wonders about the lack of love stories (in her own life) to think about how a chance opportunity could yield one in her own life.

Episode 4 had the least action but probably more meaning. Family vacations tend to have lasting impact memories. When Ha-Kyung sits alone on a beach where she remembers a crowded summer of tourists, she is reminded good times can take a back seat to bad times. Her father struggled at work back then just as he struggles with technology today. Just as she stares into the vast sea, she is insignificant as she is on a customer service telephone call. When she is drawn into an old man’s debate of what’s wrong with the country, it is much later she realizes that the old man has lived a longer struggle than herself that may have made him bitter. She sees him fawn over his grandchild, she now understands as she remembers the societal code to respect one elders, which she herself is heading now with her first gray hair. She is no longer frustrated with her father asking her for help; his...

Quite simply, it's excellent.
Thanks Dramaddictally for the recaps, episode 4 is also my favourite.

I’m just finishing this drama now, a bit after the fact.

I’ve been struggling with it, frankly, finding that it…doesn’t hold my attention. It’s not that I don’t “like” (or want to “subscribe” to :)) it. I think that it is because I find it to be like an empty vessel of meaning, waiting for the viewer to fill it up. And, right now, I’m pretty empty.

However (하지만), what a reward I have received for persisting in the discomfort of sitting alone with a drama that won’t tell me about itself! These comments from my fellow Beanies.

You all have offered up your “meanings” in such fantastic, differing detail! What a panoply of ideas and suggestions and inklings about how to be human…

I should give back too, as I can. I found the lonely, rudderless, desperation of the writer in episode one particularly painful to experience, and connected it deeply with the artist and her friends in episode two as well as the filmmaker in episode three. If I didn’t know better, and I probably don’t, I might even say that a certain conservative elder from episode four might also be simply using their “know-better” stance to cover up this same pain.