I’m going to transfer the timeline here for easy access. I’ll edit what I originally wrote here: Crash Landing on You: Comparisons with Memories of the Alhambra

JungHyuk was in Switzerland in 2007 since that was the year on his application form; he registered for the school year of 2007-2008.

That was 12 years ago (I’m using 2019, not 2020, as reference point).

Note: It was written on the form, “This application form, fully complete, signed and dated, must be sent before March 1st 2019 to the following address….”

In 2009, Seri formed her Seri’s Choice company.

Why do I say it’s 2009? I wrote about it here: Crash Landing on You: Eps 1 and 2 First Impressions

She had her “doljabi,” that fortune-telling ceremony done when the child is a year old in 1989.

From Episode 2:

That makes her 31 years old in 2019.

According to her father, she created the company ten years ago. In 2009, she was 21 years old.

From Episode 1:

Then in 2012, JungHyuk’s hyung passed away. Dan’s mother complained that they’ve been in mourning for seven years.

From Episode 6:

He had to return to North Korea then.

His path and Seri’s crossed around that time.

Quick calculation tells us JungHyuk had been studying in Switzerland for five years, and Seri’s company had been operational for three years when they met in Switzerland.

Now, about this *ALMOST* arranged marriage between Seri and SungJoon…

From Episode 7:

On their first date, Seri already turned him down. This was their first date.

From Episode 5:

It was their first date because he wasn’t aware of her peculiar eating habit. He hadn’t been forewarned by her Brother #2 that she was a picky princess and didn’t eat more than three bites of anything unless it was very good.

Sungjoon tried to sweet talk her into another date because he didn’t know she’d be this pretty.

But we know that this first date happened at least seven years ago. While he was proposing to her on Christmas Eve, he mentioned that they split up seven years ago.

From Episode 8:

When JungHyuk asked about her relationship with SungJung, she explained it this way:

“Just listen. When you’re sick of competition, you might wish your competitor to vanish. I guess my brothers were like that. So they decided to marry me off. To that guy we just met. He’s an overseas Korean. It means my brothers wanted to send me to another country. To send me far away so they won’t have to see me. So I won’t take anything from them. But I didn’t do as I was told. There’s no way I’d do such a thing. My brothers must be really excited by now. They might think I’m dead.”

Note: SungJoon’s another name is Alberto Gu. He’s a British national.

From Episode 8:

To me, her realization that her brothers wanted her to “vanish” by arranging her marriage to Alberto Gu aka SungJoon must have been one of the causes of her depression. She went to Switzerland seven years ago.

She recounted, “Back then, I didn’t want to live. I thought it’d be nice to spend my final moments in a place with beautiful scenery. But during the trip, I realized that I did not want to die. I just didn’t want to live.”

She said, “I  just needed some consolation. I’d never live the kind of life where I could be loved by those whom I love.”

This is interesting. She was admitting that she loved her family but they didn’t love her. Now, I can understand the fierce sibling rivalry. I don’t get why she believed she was unloved by her parents, especially by her father, who’s supposedly her biological father. At 21, she left home and started her own company. Surely, she used her parents’ capital to start it up. Their financial backing could be considered as  proof that they cared enough for her to provide for her independence.

She said, “But I still wanted to hear someone say that I could live and that I must keep on living.”

This was sad. She needed someone to tell that she could live because she believed that she was unwanted. In her mind, her family would have much preferred that she hadn’t been born, that she was dead or that she was far away from them.

It also explained her recording she made at the bridge. She said, “I am on top of a bridge in Sigriswil. I have no regrets. Dad, Sejun oppa, Sehyeong oppa, and… Mom. I’m going far away. Don’t live too happily, though. Every now and then, do think of me.” She really believed that she was obliging them and making them happy by killing herself.

She said, “And right at that moment, that melody started playing as if it was the answer to my prayer. ‘You can live.’ ‘You must get through this.’ It gave me solace.”

She not only heard the music but she also spotted JungHyuk playing the piano on the dock.

Now, in one of the comments, I said that she must have seen his face while he was playing the piano. I thought the director was trolling us with this ambiguity. “Did she or did she not see his face?” 

I also joked that, unless a birdpoop landed splat on JungHyuk’s face and covered his face as he was playing the the piano, or a giant wave of water came out of nowhere so she had to close her eyes,

like this—

there was no way, she couldn’t have seen his face. The way that boat was moving, she was going to have a clear line of vision and plenty of time to gape at him.

Moreover, I think that JungHyuk was actually waiting for that boat she was on to transport him, his luggage and his piano to the airport. That was why he was on that dock.

Frankly speaking, it wouldn’t shock me if they were to encounter each other again on the dock. She would be getting off the boat to explore the town, and he’d be getting on board to leave town.  This “missed encounter” is a favorite trope in kdramas, and CLoY is definitely milking it. 

So…unless Seri suffers from prosopagnosia, she should have been able to recognize Jung Hyuk as he played the piano as that stranger she met on the bridge.

Even if she couldn’t remember him from that paragliding encounter — because she was oblivious to him or something,

she SHOULD have remembered him from the bridge encounter. That time, she had her eyes on him as she took a photo of him and she noticed how good-looking he was.

And now, on the dock, he was there again.

Seri would have to particularly stupid not to recognize him. Even I, who have cross-race bias and senility to boot, would remember a face like Hyun Bin’s. Also, his face would stand out in a crowd just by the fact that he was a foreigner in a foreign land, just like Seri.

However, I forgave her for not recognizing him instantly when they met seven years later at the DMZ. After all, she wasn’t in her right mind then.

But after this scene,

it should take her a few hours, NOT DAYS, to connect the dots and remember where she’d seen JungHyuk. She wasn’t a dumb chick.

If anything, this third flashback confirmed for me that Seri already knew that JungHyuk was the guy she was looking for since her stay in Switzerland. Once, twice, three times…there’s another trope in kdramas, that the third “accidental” meeting is fated. For Seri, encountering JungHyuk for the third time would leave a big impression on her. She would think that it was a “fated.”

To me, when she teased him that he wanted to her destiny, and that destiny brought them together, there was double meaning there.

It was unfortunate then that she didn’t get to know his name in Switzerland. She only had that melody to track him by.

She confessed to searching for the name of the song. She had looked up all the songs she could think of. She even asked her musical friends and acquaintances if they’d heard of the music. But no one knew the name of the song.

Given that, she would have deduced, or at least suspected, that the music she heard him play was an original composition, and that he was the composer. He’d been playing it from the heart, without notes.

So, the only recourse left to Seri was to find the name of the composer. If she could somehow find the name of the composer, then she would also find the man she met in Switzerland.  But as it turned out, she found the man first when she crash-landed on him in North Korea.