After the epic game of baseball the day before, we only had one last thing on our list for Busan and that was to see the colorful houses in Gamcheon Culture Village.
This part of town was built a hundred years ago and consists in thousands of small houses laid across slopes of mountainous terrain. Despite the maze of alleyways and narrow passageways that hint at how long ago this place was established, Gamcheon fells fresh and hip thanks to a recent public art renovation started in 2009. All the houses are painted in bright colors and there’s a TON of art in the streets — paintings, sculptures, installations.
We got off at a subway stop that would leave us at the bottom of the village (or so we thought) and we would walk the remaining 300 or 400m which would be a nice way to get introduced to the vibe of the place. The subway stop had patterns and paintings and decorations all around, but we soon found that the walk up would be more of a climb than we were interested in.
After making the right decision and stopping mid-way to get on a small bus, we were finally at the entrance of the village where we got an immediate panoramic view from North to South.
The place was vibrant and full of people. We dived quickly into the labyrinth of narrow alleyways as if were kids and were playing a game where the goal was to see who could get to the other side.
After walking for a while we got lunch for the girls and a couple of refreshing drinks for us two adults in Nakalong. We also found some coffee shops that carry novelty food items and got a beautiful and yummy toasted marshmallow ice cream from one of them.
Once we felt we walked through pretty much every passageway and seen every shop in the area, we walked all the way to the famous seafood Jagalchi Market passing by some really quaint narrow streets and meeting some nice ladies in a market.
Jagalchi Market is truly impressive. The amount of seafood we had never seen before surprised us, and we are from Portugal so we should know our seafood.
Everything was super organized, there’s the live market and the “dry” market, and there’s even a whole floor above filled with restaurants where they’ll cook whatever you buy downstairs.
We befriended a stall vendor that promised he sold the best food, but unfortunately we weren’t hungry. Next time, buddy. I still have your business card!
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