Gamcheon Village, BIFF Square, Haebyeon Beach

What a strange, forgotten sensation, to walk outside and simply… not be cold! At this rate I’m going to be overdressed!

For my first day in Busan, I decided to start with an iconic sight: Gamcheon Village! Originally, Gamcheon started as a slum of houses for post-war refugees, draped along the slopes of a hill. In the 1990s, however, the city turned it into a lived-in art project, filling it with murals, sculptures, decorations and all sorts of art installations right alongside the houses where people continue to live.

I was aware of the large distances involved in sightseeing in Busan, but the 50 minutes it tool to go from Seomyeon to Gamcheon still felt really long! The bus dropped me off right in front of the Visitor’s Center, at least. The entrance to the village is free, but if you want a map, you have to buy it for 2,000 won (€1.42); nobody’s going bankrupt over that pittance, but the truth is that you don’t really need the map if you’re only going to do the standard route, which follows a clearly delineated path. I was happy to buy mine, because I did a sort of hybrid short-medium route and the tiny, sloped streets get confusing very fast!

The main road is extremely touristy, lined with takeaway coffee shops and cheap souvenir shops, not to mention crowded with lots of domestic as well as foreign tourists (like myself!). Here I finally saw French, German, and Italian tourists, which confirms that they exists. Where were they? Where do they go next? Oh, speaking of tourists, a recurring motif here for some unfathomable reason is The Little Prince, the most prized photo opportunity being a statue of the prince that had a long line of people (off to the left of the picture below), again orderly queuing to be able to sit next to it and have a clear view.

Moreso than the tourist traps, the main attraction at Gamcheon is the village itself, especially the spectacular view of the colorful houses cascading down the hills like someone dropped a bucket of toys down a slope. Because the hill is kind of U-shaped, and the main road is curved along the way, the view shifts as you advance and you get to see all sides of the view from different vantage points.

As busy as it was on the upper level, the second I turned left outside of the main path the streets were immediately empty. Following a much narrower path on the way back, I had to stop every few steps to check my map because there were dozens of tiny alleyways going in all directions and I didn’t want to accidentally find myself in someone’s living room!

Eventually I made it back to where I started, where I got on a bus down the hill to BIFF Square in Nampo-dong, another of Busan’s “centers”. This one is so-called because of the Busan International Film Festival, or BIFF, which actually was in October so I just missed it! If I was expecting some kind of movie star glamour, however, I was fast disappointed: the square, with its Walk of Fame-like stars and hand prints of famous directors, looks kind of like Leicester Square in London (which is ghastly enough) if it had been overrun by street vendors.

There’s not a lot to recommend in this place; I mostly just took this chance to have lunch at one of those places where you have to order through a machine at the entrance (oh no!) but thankfully this one was also available in English (phew). I had bulgogi, which was fine. I also took the chance to walk over to Fashion Street, off BIFF Square, which has several multinational and Korean fashion brands. Not to keep harping on Korean fashion, but I walked into a couple more stores that I hadn’t seen yet and literally every item was white, beige or black. The most extravagant one also had some items in olive green, for when you’re feeling crazy. The street ends at one of the Lotte Malls, which I peeked into just to gawk at the enormity of a ten-floor department store. Turns out they were having a big Pokemon pop-up store in the basement, and it had drawn quite the crowd!

From Nampo, I wanted to take the chance to jump over to Yeongdo island, because I wanted to check out Haebyeon beach, where a couple of pivotal scenes from the great show Pachinko were shot. Once again, to impress upon you the concept of Busan distances: I took a bus at the northern tip of Yeongdo island (just on the corner of the Lotte Mall), and it took 30 minutes (!!) to drive down to the southern tip! And the driver was driving like a madman the whole time! There were like 25 stops. Maybe they’re all very close together and that wastes time? Yeongdo was an odd place, with touches of being s fishing island mixed with being a big city in and of itself.

Anyway, I finally made it to the beach, which is tiny but curious because it’s made of large pebbles instead of sand. I can’t imagine it’s very fun for swimming; the stones almost hurt my feet through my shoes, imagine without them! I was excited to recognize the place from the show (especially because it plays such an important role in the show), but I have to say the circumstances around it are not so charming: there are touristy snack shops behind the beach, and an actual landfill behind the shops, plus even the ocean is marred by enormous commercial and industrial tankers going about their routes.

With the sun glaring down on me like a ticking clock, I didn’t dilly-dally on the beach. I did walk up to the water, to discover that the waves make an unusual crackling sound when they retreat through the pebbles. With the whole beach to myself, I was the only one who could hear it, and now so can you:

Getting from the southern tip of Yeongdo to my apartment in Seomyeon took like an hour and fifteen minutes! And I didn’t even have to wait long for buses, it’s just that they take forever and have literally dozens of stops. For this route, I just had to take bus 101 from Yeongdo back to Nampo, then 82 from Nampo to Seomyeon. Half an hour each!

Anyway, that’s about all the time and energy I had for sightseeing, so I retreated back to my apartment where I had a good rest before heading out to fetch some konbini dinner.

And now, to plan what I’m gonna do tomorrow!