I got sick recently so I wanted to watch something while I was recovering. So, I opened up Netflix and remembered that a girl on a dating app mentioned that her brother was recommended “Welcome to Sandal-ri”1. I started watching the show and there were some familiar cast members. The main lead, Ji Chang-wook, was in a few kdramas I’ve liked in the past and similar story with a couple of the main supporting characters, Kim Mi-kyung and Lee Jae-won2.
The story is about a village in Jeju island called Samdal-ri and a complicated love story between a guy named Cho Yong-Pil and and a girl named Cho Sam-dal. Their mothers were best friends and they had both of the children on the same day. While chatting about the future, they promised that they would raise each other’s children as their own and that the children were soulmates bound to get married together. However, a terrible accident occurs that severs the the mothers’ bond for good.
The kdrama skips from present to past frequently, but it is mainly set in present day Korea where Cho Sam-dal is a reputable photographer that is preparing for an important exhibition for a fashion magazine in Seoul. A couple scandals emerge that rock her to her core, causing her to flee back to her hometown. The drama slowly reveals the pain that she and the two families have dealt with throughout the years and how Cho Yong-Pil and Cho Sam-dal work together to mend their families’ relationship and to clear her name.
I thought that this was a solid kdrama. The cast was well picked. I thought that the girl playing the younger sister of Cho Sam-dal was so pretty. There were a bunch of great shots of the ocean and the sky and the landscape. I’ve seen at least a couple kdramas about Jeju Island and this one had similar focuses – a focus on protecting the environment, a focus on haenyeos, a focus on fresh seafood. One thing I appreciated about this kdrama over the others was how the story kept tying back to this Jeju Island village. I feel like the others touched on a surface level or snorkeling level of Jeju Island culture, but this one went a bit deeper. I thought that this kdrama would be a bit more funny and lighthearted, but there were a lot of heavy topics. Perhaps that is part of the reason I was so invested in the story and why I finished the sixteen episode series in two days.
- Now that I’m looking at the receipts, the brother actually recommended “Castaway Diva”, so that might affect the review haha ↩︎
- Now that I’m looking at these actors’ IMDb pages, I mistook a bunch of the actors. I thought that Ji Chang-wook was the guy from “The King” kdrama, but that was Lee Min Ho and I thought that Lee Jae-won was the guy from “It’s Okay to Not Be Okay”, but that was Oh Jung-se ↩︎
Jeffrey's Thoughts 