When the Camellia Blooms | Sinheung Market, Haebangchon — Ongsan's Seoul

Not all of it is the fishing town. The drama's Seoul material was shot in Haebangchon, on the southern slope of Namsan, and location guides place the arcade where Yongsik and Pil-gu play games in Sinheung Market. Worth flagging: Seoul city and Korean press confirm the market as a filming site for this drama, but I could not find a Korean primary source pinning that specific scene, so treat the episode attribution as unconfirmed.

해방촌 means liberation village. People displaced after 1945 and again during the war built here on the hillside because nobody else wanted the gradient, and 신흥시장 grew as the market that fed them. For decades it was knitting workshops and food stalls; by the 2010s most of the shutters were down.

Then a Seoul regeneration project ran from 2015 to 2021 and the market filled again — around sixty-four units now, a mix of old stalls that never closed and new cafés and bars under the same low roof and the same tangle of wiring. It is free, open, and best in the late afternoon when both populations overlap.

Walk out of the southern end and Namsan Tower is directly overhead. Dongbaek's Seoul is a hillside settled by people who arrived with nothing and stayed anyway — which is the same story she is living in Ongsan, three hundred kilometres down the coast, with worse gossip and better crab.