The Weekly Times No. 4: #MeetYourKimchi Edition!
I’ve been looking forward to this past weekend for quite some time! When we bought the tickets for the Meet Your Kimchi Tour back at the start of May, the end of July seemed like ages away. And now it’s all over already. But we had such a great time.
To take a step back, Eat Your Kimchi is a YouTube channel put together by Simon and Martina, a Canadian couple that moved to South Korea 7 years ago to teach English. Their videos share insights into Korean pop-culture, food, and customs in a positive and welcoming way. After a couple years of watching their videos, it really feels like friends are sending you a letter from Korea a couple times a week.
I honestly stumbled upon their videos while trying to learn more about Korea in general. A few years ago I realized that the majority of the Japanese fashion I was admiring online was actually Korean fashion. Needless to say, my world view opened up a great deal once I made that realization. I’ve since become a fan of Korean Dramas, food, beauty, and fashion. The Eat Your Kimchi videos played a major factor in my interest in trying out all these new things that are now some of my favorites.
The internet makes the world amazingly accessible. While I haven’t know about the global community behind Eat Your Kimchi for long (I totally followed them for almost two years on YouTube before I even realized they had an awesome website!), it blows my mind how far this common interest in understanding more about Korea reaches.
When the Meet Your Kimchi Tour across parts of Canada and the US was announced, and I realized that I had just moved into one of the areas they’d be visiting, it finally hit me that our new location meant I could actually attend things like this! We bought tickets as soon as they opened up.
Sunday morning we hopped on the train, and made our way downtown. The event was a great mix of audience interaction and a live taste of the sillier parts of what goes on in their videos. I was super impressed with the depth of the questions brought up by the people bold enough to step up to the mic. Watching videos online seems kinda one-sided often times, but to get to have a back and forth with the Eat Your Kimchi Crew was wonderful. At the end of the event, we actually got to have a chat with the Crew and take some photos. Such a great time!
I’ll definitely start being active in the community, and I’m super interested in where Eat Your Kimchi takes Simon and Martina next. If Simon has his way and just travels the world eating food, I’ll still be following right along.
