Hello

Greetings faithful friends and followers,

We thought it might be nice to start a blog to share our adventures with you all on a regular basis, and truthfully also to keep ourselves apprised of what the heck we've been up to so we can give ourselves a boot up the arse when what we've been up to is nothing. This week we were back on the market game after a bit of a break for the last ever weekend of the lovely Partick Pop Up Market — pictures on our Instagram. We were so very glad to have been able to be part of it before it ended. We met some really cool people doing really cool things, like Eclectic Eclairs, Bear Tree Apothecary and Bobalicious. We sold all of our pancakes and most of our kimchi jjigae and jars of kimchi, as well as some of our incredibly soft and stylin' t-shirts. Please let us know if you would like one, however, at the moment, we only have smalls and mediums — we will restock soon. We’ll also be at The Cooperage tomorrow (assuming we get this posted by Friday), so please come by and say hi if you can!

We also thought we would kick off this blog writing thing with a little bit about how Gomo Kimchi came to be. A little bit about the fresh-faced, cautiously optimistic duo behind this whole operation. So, if you don't care about that, feel free to stop reading now.

Eddie looking confused in at the cherry blossom festival in Changwon.

I (Maggie) met Eddie 5 years ago when we were both living and teaching English in South Korea. I'm from Glasgow and Eddie hails from Seattle. I was in Seoul (where Eddie was living at the time) celebrating my birthday, and Eddie was invited to hang out by a mutual friend. Eddie was wooed by the fact that I wore a dress with dinosaurs on it, and I was wooed by the fact that he was wooed by that. The first text he ever sent me was 'you are the worst' and I cannot argue with that. 

Maggie looking contemplative at the cherry blossom festival in Changwon.

For our 'first date,' I invited him to a cherry blossom festival, which he traveled for 5 hours over several trains and buses to attend (again, the worst, but I guess he must have liked me). And the rest, as they say, is history. I only had a 6-month teaching contract in Korea and a place at Glasgow Caledonian University to study nursing that September, so I had to leave. We did the long distance thing for a while (spanning South Korea, Germany, and Scotland) before we eventually decided to get Eddie a visa and settle down (for now, at least) in sunny Glasgow. 

Eddie has always wanted to make kimchi and started learning from his aunt (the famous Olympic speed-skating ‘Gomo’ in Gomo Kimchi) while living in Korea. It was a struggle at first with gomo giving him instructions like 'add salt until it tastes like the sea,' while Eddie filmed her with his little GoPro, but I think we can all agree that he has most definitely gotten the hang of it (I'm mostly entirely unhelpful and just put stickers on jars and things that require much less skill than actually making kimchi). He has wanted to start Gomo Kimchi for a long time, but has been cautioned against it by his family who were understandably scarred by a lifetime of Westerners decidedly *not* liking Korean food. But y’know, Korean culture is mainstream now. And if you don't like kimchi, it means you're the one that's out of the zeitgeist. And so Gomo Kimchi was finally born last year. And we have had a very encouraging amount of support from all you lovely people. 

We got legally married almost 3 years ago (August 2019) and finally managed to have a proper big celebration with our loved ones in April (re-arranged about 3 times due to COVID). Lots of Eddie's wonderful family and friends managed to make the journey from various parts of the USA, Korea, and Canada to celebrate with us which was incredibly lovely. Planning for that and the ensuing chaos has, however, meant that we haven't been able to be as active with Gomo Kimchi over the past few months as we would have liked (especially since we both unfortunately still have other jobs — I'm a nurse and Eddie is a copywriter/editor/poet/jack-of-all-writing-trades). But we're back on it now and buzzing to dive head first into the wonderful world of kimchi. 

We'll try our best to update this blog weekly-ish and if there's anything in particular you'd like to hear a bit more about please let us know!