Walking around Busan gives you an odd feeling. It is clearly a big city, yet almost nothing runs straight the way it does in Seoul.
The reason is the terrain. Busan is wedged between mountains and the sea. With little flat ground, roads could not be laid straight. Instead of cutting through the hills, they went around them — so the roads, the alleys and the stairways all bend.
Go up to the Sanbok Road and you can see it all at once. Houses sit in layers along the slope, with the road winding between them. This is not the shape of a planned city but of one that grew to fit its ground.
Seeing the city from a bridge at night
The best way to see Busan is to drive across Gwangan Bridge. At night.
From the bridge, the lights of Haeundae and Gwangalli curve away along the shoreline. That is when you understand that the city is not laid out in a line but bent around the water. The curve passes slowly outside the car window.
People who remember Busan usually remember this angle rather than any particular place.
Busan blue is never one blue
The morning sea is closer to grey. By midday it turns deep blue, and as the sun drops it goes briefly green. At night it is black, except where the lights land and it stays a bright blue.
And the beige of sand runs through all of it. Calling Busan a blue city is only half true. The color of this city is the edge where blue meets sand.
So this is the color we gave Busan
kory's Busan hair roller starts from a deep sea blue — not a light, breezy sky blue, but the weighted blue that the daytime sea actually has.
For a city of bent roads and a curved shoreline, it felt right that the color shouldn't resolve in one go either.