Some of the most iconic pictures taken by visitors to Busan are of a small town that has houses that are cheerful looking colors, and which sits on a steep hill. This place is Gamcheon Culture Village, which in 2009 was decorated by students, artists and residents to turn it into the famous tourist attraction of the city
We read that the village can get really crowded, so we made visiting this place our first stop on our first full free day of exploration on Day 02. The village is a short 18 minute cab ride away from our apartment, and we got there plenty early at 8:30AM. The cab driver wasn’t quite sure where to drop us off once we got to the village area itself, but we haphazard a guess and pointed at a random stop that looked interesting and got off. As it turned out, that spot we alighted was where the statues of the Little Prince and Desert Fox were, and what is apparently the most photographed place in the village. We were about the only visitors in the area when we arrived. But by the time we left at noon, there was a long snaking queue of visitors waiting for their turn to pose with the two statues.
We’d initially intended to spend just two hours in the village, but ended up spending three. The most interesting bits of the village seem to lie in a stretch that runs for perhaps 200 meters of walking with the two statues nearing one end of the stretch. There was a flip book photo studio where visitors can do 8 second poses for the studio to turn it into a super cool flip animation book. The shoot and book is included in the Busan Visitor pass, but we didn’t avail ourselves of this opportunity as we were only going to activate the pass for use only on Day 03. So, we booked our shoot and photo book through Klook, and paid SGD13 for it. The completed book is really cool, but to get the best animation sequence, you’d really need to think ahead of the kind of stunt you want to do over 8 seconds! Not to worry on ideation though: there are many sample flipbooks in the studio for visitors to browse and plan with.
The studio opened at 10AM, and there was a long queue waiting when it opened. There were five groups ahead of us, and each took around 6 to 8. We waited around 30 minutes before we got to our turn, and our session was a chop-chop 6 minutes for us to plan, do a quick couple of rehearsals, and for the photographer to capture the necessary sequence. After that, it was another 25 minutes for the book to get printed and bound.
There was also an interesting shop that was turning digital photographs into photos laser-engraved onto wood. We thought this would be something to decorate our home with, so went for it and paid 40,000 won for the largest picture.
In all, a visit to Gamcheon Culture Village is a must-stop. Aside from it truly being pictureseque, the 200 meter stretch is filled with cafes, artisan, trinket and souvenir shops.