Eatyourkimchi
Encyclopedia
Eatyourkimchi is a video guide to living in Korea created by Simon and Martina Stawski. The YouTube channel featuring their videos is the 18th most popular in Korea and the YouTube portion of their videos has had more than seven million views.

Kimchi
Kimchi
Kimchi , also spelled gimchi, kimchee, or kim chee, is a traditional fermented Korean dish made of vegetables with varied seasonings. There are hundreds of varieties of kimchi made with a main vegetable ingredient such as napa cabbage, radish, green onions or cucumber. It is the most common...

 is an iconic, fermented Korean vegetable dish.

Video guide to everyday life

The video series seeks to fill a gap left by travel guides and government organizations by helping teach visitors from other countries about daily life in Korea. According to Elsyabeth Hahm of Yonhap News, eatyourkimchi does give viewers "a local's perspective into Korean culture that you can't get from your average guidebook." The videos take a humorous approach and target an audience that prefers to "watch" rather than read.

The video blog has some recurring themes and topics such as the Korean language, food, and music. Individual videos have covered how a Korean washing machine works, delivery services, the table bells in Korean restaurants, and how to pay bills. The series has included cooking videos for bulgogi
Bulgogi
Bulgogi is a Korean dish that usually consists of marinated barbecued beef, although chicken or pork may also be used. It is listed at number 23 on World's 50 most delicious foods readers' poll complied by CNN Go in 2011.-Etymology:...

, samgyeopsal
Samgyeopsal
Samgyeopsal is a popular Korean dish. Commonly served as an evening meal, it consists of thick, fatty slices of pork belly meat . The meat, usually neither marinated nor seasoned, is cooked on a grill at the diners' table...

, galbi
Galbi
Galbi or kalbi generally refers to a variety of gui or grilled dishes in Korean cuisine that is made with marinated beef short ribs in a ganjang-based sauce . In the Korean language, galbi literally means "rib" and can often indicate uncooked ribs...

 and many other foods. They also have regularly scheduled segments such as Kpop
K-pop
K-pop is a musical genre consisting of electropop, hip hop, pop, rock, and R&B music originating in South Korea...

 Music Mondays, Wonderful Treasure Find (WTF) and Too Long; Didn't Read (TL;DR).

Background

The Stawskis are a married couple from Canada who moved to Korea in 2008. When they arrived on May 31, 2008 there had been threats of violence between North and South Korea. As a result, they shot their first video at the Incheon International Airport
Incheon International Airport
Incheon International Airport is the largest airport in South Korea, the primary airport serving the Seoul national capital area, and one of the largest and busiest airports in the world...

 as an attempt to show the couple's parents that they were safe. The video showed the tired couple enjoying a tofu dish called sundubu jjige
Sundubu jjigae
Sundubu jjigae is a hot and spicy jjigae dish made with uncurdled dubu , seafood , vegetables, mushrooms, onion, scallions, and gochujang or gochu garu in Korean cuisine. A raw egg is put in the jjigae while it is still boiling...

. However, the video blogging grew into an "everything about Korea” channel.

In addition to its personal story, Eat Your Kimchi is also part of some larger trends in Korea. There were no Korean blogging services before 2002, but since then the number of bloggers has grown year by year and the number of Korean blogs created by non-citizens has swelled along with it. Then in 2008, YouTube entered the Korean market. According to Yoon Ja-young of The Korea Times, with the introduction of YouTube "life changed" for some Korean residents such as the Stawskis. As of 2011 their particular video blog format is still not common in Korea since according to Martina Stawski "barely anyone does dedicated videos about Korea."

Reception and audience

The Korea Herald included Eatyourkimchi in a list of 21 of "the nation’s most useful websites" and at Hiexpat.com it was voted the best expat blog in Korea. The video bloggers behind eatyourkimchi have been featured on television shows such as Heart to Heart, Quilt Your Korean Map, Star King, and Running Man
Running Man (TV series)
Running Man is a South Korean variety show; a part of SBS's Good Sunday lineup, along with K-pop Star . It was first aired on July 11, 2010. This show is classified as an "urban action variety"; a never-before-seen new genre of variety shows. The MCs and guests complete missions in a landmark to...

. They are stopped in the street by people taking pictures. However the blog has also received some criticism from viewers. The Stawskis report that "the fans only want to hear positive things, so every so often fans will swarm our site and leave hate comments."

Martina Stawski says that eatyourkimchi has a worldwide audience, but that the biggest concentrations of viewers are in Australia, USA, Canada, and South Korea. Eatyourkimchi videos are distributed online through iTunes
ITunes
iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....

, Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

, Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

, Tumblr
Tumblr
Tumblr is a website and microblogging platform that allows users to post text, images, videos, links, quotes and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog. Users can follow other users, or choose to make their tumblelog private. The service emphasizes ease of use. The site ranks as the 10th...

, and YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

. As of 2011, their YouTube channel has more than 33,300 subscribers and nearly 7.5 million upload views. Meanwhile their website (which also hosts videos) receives more than 750,000 hits a month from more than 100,000 viewers.
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