When the Camellia Blooms | Guryongpo Port — Where Yongsik Runs

Yongsik runs along the quay because he has worked something out about Dongbaek and cannot make himself wait. Behind him, nets, stacked crates, boats tied three deep. None of that was arranged. 구룡포항 at 호미로 222-1 is a working fishing port and has been since the 1920s. Snow crab and squid come in here; the auction hall opens early and is not quiet about it; the red breakwater lighthouse at the harbour mouth is the fixed point in the drama's establishing shots of Ongsan. Guryongpo is also the place daegu-gwamegi comes from — half-dried Pacific saury, hung out in the sea wind through winter, which is the local food nobody puts on a tourism poster. Practically, this is where the pilgrimage starts. Free public parking sits along the port, and everything else is within six hundred metres uphill: the Japanese house street, the Camellia sign, the stone staircase, the museum. You can do the whole circuit in an hour and a half without moving the car. Get here before eight in the morning. The auction is still running, the crates are still wet, and men are shouting prices at each other in a dialect the subtitles would not help you with. The town in the drama runs on gossip. The town it was filmed in runs on crab — and at six in the morning only one of those is actually happening.