True Love - South Korea style: Part 9 - love-matching must be pre-planned because you don't just find your true love on the street even when wearing matching puffer jackets (of course, it could just be that the guy was not interested but that would make for a rather boring story)

There is no doubt that Incheon airport, Seoul's international airport, is the best place in Korea to spot love match couples (although Busan comes close). Couples heading off on holidays, perhaps even honeymoons, wander happily hand in hand through the airport wearing matching sneakers, sweat pants, sweaters, jackets, beanies or, if you are extra lucky, all of those items altogether. And because they are getting away and, presumably, are even happier to be heading away together (husband and I even managed to be happy at the airport although our happiness did not last long when we were told that, no, we could not check our kids in with the luggage and that, yes, we do actually have to sit with them on the plane) they are super happy to be photographed together. Christmas time makes for even better pictures too because love is expressed so accurately by matching reindeer/snowflake red sweaters. A lot of those sweater wearing couples in love came through security and immigration with us and some even boarded the same flight which was awesome for my growing photo collection. Sadly though, due to some technical difficulties, the photos no longer exist (although I do have a new iPhone 6 plus now). What was even sadder though was that the love matching seemed to end when we got off the plane. This meant that I was forced to survive three weeks without love match encounters. I felt a little lost without it. The only thing that helped my forced detoxification was that friends at home were very eager to quiz me about the trend: some thought that I had been making the whole thing up; some thought I was a little obsessed; some had their own very definite views on the pros and cons of wearing the same thing as your partner; and there was a lot of questions as to how far I was going to take this pre-occupation (a picture book is coming and I am available to discuss the matter on a YouTube channel, television and/or any radio program). Most pressing of all though, was the need to know just how couples agree on the particular item of clothing that they decide to love match with. So, because I like my friends back home, I have returned to Seoul (coming back through Incheon airport, observing couples putting on their matching sweaters and jackets before leaving the terminal) determined to find answers.

This morning,  I watched this couple find each other.

I found the man first because he got on the same bus as me. We got off at the same stop too but we were clearly not destined for bus love as he speedily exited the bus, ran across the road and into the arms of his "special friend" without even a second glance back at me. I think this is why: I was wearing cheetah print jeans, red converse and a black puffer jacket (a particularly special look that I am rolling with at the moment). I was not wearing black pants, red puffer or black nikes with a yellow swoosh. Question is, if I was wearing this particular outfit would he have run to me instead? Do you automatically fall in love with someone who is wearing the 
the same clothes as you? 

In this case, it did look like he might have already known his mate - that the meeting was not serendipitous - but the familiarity they expressed could have just been overwhelming joy at their realisation that they had found their soulmate, in clothes at least. I continued to watch them for a little bit, seeing her  willingly walking beside him to wherever it was they were going. I did not find that where it was they were going though as I thought it best to stop stalking at that point (it was getting weird, even for me). Nor did I interrupt their encounter to ask about their love - i.e. was it spontaneous and instantaneous (it was cold and I needed coffee). I like to imagine it was love simply because of their outfits. But, if that really was the case, then why did love not happen for me last Sunday when I met my matching puffer man? (For the sake of the story here I am conveniently forgetting that I am married.)

Jackets are a big thing here in Korea. Mainly because it is cold so jackets are a necessity rather than an optional fashion extra. I have never been great with jacket wearing and/or jacket owning. Before coming to Korea, I owned one black trench coat that was forced to also work as a warm jacket when husband refused to let me steal his for the day. My Dad is well aware of my jacket stealing tendencies. I spent the winters of my university years wearing Dad's duffle coat (affectionally called Bluey) that he wore to building sites around town. Admittedly, this was perhaps not the most stylish of jacket choices as pointed out to me by my love interest at the time at a fancy nightclub in Melbourne. I am pretty sure that when boy said to me that my fashion choice was rather "novel" he did not mean it as a compliment.  

The first thing we purchased when we arrived in Seoul were puffer jackets (jackets that have loads of down inside of them) from UNIQLO. Both have been wonderful discoveries. UNIQLO because it is just awesome. Puffers because who does not want to dress, or at least feel, like a marshmallow in winter? UNIQLO (and other places) sell puffer jackets in all shapes, sizes and colours and they are incredibly affordable and just so warming to wear. I started my Korean adventure with a simple black puffer and have added to it with a bright green, a sleeveless grey number and am currently on the hunt for a brown one with faux fur lining. I am also considering rolling a mum at school who is wears a hot pink puffer with matching hot pink faux fur (I think) lining. Amazing. Anyway, a while ago I needed a lighter jacket for the not so cold days and a shorter version then the long one (it is a need, not a want). So I went to UNIQLO (obviously) and purchased a perfect navy blue jacket (I was at UNIQLO so, of course, everything was perfect (apart from the cream and  light pink puffers which were so very clearly not perfect on me as noted by the helpful sales staff who stifled giggles of horror behind me). I left with my navy blue puffer (and maybe a few other things as well) and this, finally, brings me to the pointy end of my story: last Sunday morning.

It was early for a Sunday (generally anytime before 9am is early so on Sundays, 830am  is really, really early). It was also a little chilly and the sky was rather dark because the sun was still not sure whether or not she felt like making an appearance. There was, therefore, an aura of romance in the misty conclave of Yonhui-dong. Dressed in my navy blue puffer, I was walking purposefully down the road to the bus, heading to my local cafe for some much needed rest from my (lovely) family. In my head I was thinking about: what to cook for dinner; what to pick up from the supermarket on my way back home (which was dependent on what I had decided to cook for dinner); whether it was time to admit to the inevitable and write a job application; or if it was time to advertise my services around town as a professional stylist (red canvas sneakers, cheetah print jeans and stealing Dad's work jacket obviously being glamour looks worth replicating), dance instructor or a karaoke tutor (the fact that I cannot do either should not impede my ability to inspire others). As I continued to walk, daydream and rummage through my bag to find my headphones, there was a perceptible change in the atmosphere. 

I looked up and there he was, walking towards me, headphone also on, carrying a Paris Baguette bag and wearing the exact same navy blue puffer jacket. Exactly the same. Involuntarily, I smiled up at him and paused, waiting for love to strike me/him/us.  It didn't. Definitely not for him. He just kept on walking and did not even look at me twice, perhaps not even once. And on my part, well I stopped but that was really only because I wanted some sort of acknowledgement between us that we were the only two people out this early in the morning and we were wearing the same thing! To be honest, there were no sparks flying and no instant attraction between us. We did not magically run towards each other, share the contents of his Paris Baguette bag and then skip away together, laughing inanely at some private inner joke that only lovers would understand. No, it was not like that at all. I was left standing still on the street corner, feeling utterly deflated by the encounter that never was. So does love automatically follow when you find someone else in a matching jacket? No. Well, not for me anyway. 

it's best to not multi-task in a subway and other things I have learned this week

I finally feel that 2015 is beginning this week (it is only the second week of February after all): holidays in the lovely land of endless summer are so far behind us now that they are almost forgotten; there is some sort of school routine going on; I am valiantly attempting to exercise (more accurately, have a shower) pre school drop off and I have, finally, made it back to my favourite cafe (where my aim is to write but I mostly just drink endless cups of coffee (bonus: I have just discovered that they get progressively cheaper after the first one) and dream the day away). I am claiming that the reason for such a sluggish start to the new year is because I am in the land of the lunar new year so officially the new year does not begin until February 19. In addition to buying pre-prepared boxes of SPAM, I have also decided to compile a list of New Year's resolutions. (I encouraged husband to start writing a list of his new years resolutions last night (mostly about how he can improve as a husband. Needless to say the night did not turn out so well for either of us)). I thought writing up my list of resolutions would be rather straightforward, particularly given that I have been hanging out with myself for a few years now and thought that I knew all about me but, this week, I discovered some rather painful home truths that have affected my ability to prepare (quickly or, let's be honest here, even at all) such a list. 

I cannot multi-task: I have read the recent articles popping up on my Facebook and Twitter feeds about how no-one can but I thought I could (much like how I was convinced I could do a phD simultaneously while giving birth).  My attempt at multi-tasking involved listening to music on headphones through my phone while scribbling notes for a potential story while walking in a very crowded Itaewon subway station on a Friday night. I walked into a pole. Not sure who was more embarrassed: me, the pole or the hundreds of people around me who tried desperately not to laugh.

Listening to music through oversized headphones does not mean that no-one else can hear you! They most certainly will hear you when: you interrupt your best Taylor Swift impersonation to yell at the doors that are about to close you (when you belatedly emerge from your Taylor Swift stupor and realise that is actually your stop); you yell at your bag as you desperately throw stuff back into the abyss; and you yell at your headphones as you manage to get the headphones cord caught up your coat, your umbrella, your notebook and your chocolate bar as you, inconspicuously, exit. 

My bag (which perhaps I should forget on trains) is a ridiculous, disgusting, bottomless pit that eats purple crayons, mixes the purple crayon that it chooses not to eat with half-eaten biscuits and then magically smears that mess with some melted chocolate into a cheese stick wrapper to create some rather special revolting grossness inside which clings onto your hand like a Northern Clingfish (this super weird fish that has a suction cap attached to its belly) as you desperately scrounge around looking for a tissue, your phone, some lip gloss or, even, a half-eaten biscuit. 

When attempting to make a grown-up impression at places like a bank or husband's work, it is best to not search for a pen in said bag when at the bank because it is gross for everyone when you pile up the mess on the until then pristine bank bench. Just accept the pen that is offered (it will also most likely work unlike the one you finally discover in your bag that reeks of smelly cheese, is sticky and will inevitably also leak all over your hand when you triumphantly pull it out).

Running 10km one day is cancelled out rather quickly when you go off an drink champagne all the next day. Buying clothes after drinking champagne is not a good idea (none of this is to be interpreted that drinking champagne is also not a good idea because that would be just silly). Returning clothes that you buy after drinking champagne will mean nothing if you then decide to dress like Sporty Spice, Fluorescent Girl or some other random superhero you invent in your mind to justify your need to purchase clothes that make you look like you are twelve (although any of this is probably better than the "cougar mother" look that you apparently succeeded with (husband is always so flattering) when you initially bought clothes after drinking champagne).

It is almost impossible to dress kids up in winter clothes and still be on time for school. All you parents who do this are heroes. For me, it is an unattainable reality. Just as I think I have successfully dressed them in beanies, gloves, scarfs and boots on top of two fuzzies, tights, leggings and pants, the following will inevitably occur. One will rip everything off because they need to go to the toilet, one will pass out from insane intense body heat and the third will be lying on the floor (looking like a big pink sumo wrestler) crying about not being pink enough! Eventually, you will leave the house, with no jacket required for yourself because your internal body temperature will have reached boiling point (and you will be wishing it was already time for champagne). 

Helping your eight year old with her math homework will be embarrassing for you, her and her teacher when you have to ring the teacher to ask for help. 

That to be involved in any sort for a TV show in Korean you have to wear an orange beanie. I am buying one this week in the hope that it will aid me in my quest to be "discovered" (I am only 39 so am not giving up hope just yet).

Meatballs from the recently opened Ikea in Seoul are really good. This from a former vegetarian. 

In a similar vein to the fact that I cannot competitively do karaoke (despite the fact that I cannot sing - it is because I am super competitive and someone else (LINDA BROWN) top scores), I cannot watch my children at soccer practice. I kind of knew already that I might have issues when it came to watching my children participate in team sports but, just in case I had any doubts, it really came out on the weekend when I might have, slightly too aggressively, started screaming at my child (in only her second game ever) to steal the ball and kick that goal. Husband has politely suggested that it is best for everyone if I stay away in future. 

Last lesson (although I do feel I have known this all along): when in doubt, turn to a 1980's power ballad. Yazz and the Plastic Population: The Only Way Is Up is my current choice (mainly because I have finally realised who my dance muse is!).

life begins after...you finally give in and stir your bibimbap

I quite like food. This is not really a secret given that I look like I like my food, which is great because, as I just said, I like my food. Over the past two years I have developed a great liking for Korean food, probably a good thing given I live in Korea (and because, just to reiterate again, I like food). If I had to name a favourite dish, amongst the many great dishes that tempt the tastebuds here, I would have to say it is the humble bibimbap, a dish that translates literally as mixed rice (bibim = mixed and bap = rice). 

To the uninitiated, bibimbap may just look like a bowl of rice and thinly sliced vegetables. But to those who have experienced bibimbap, it is much more complex. It is the subject of its own musical (Nanta), it is a dish that was worthy of being served to royals, it is served as plane food and it even gets to go on spaceships ((Jeonju bibimbap (Jeonju is the capital city of South Korea's North Jeolla Province), famous because it is considered the home of bibimbap (its secret to success is the cooking of the rice in beef broth, its use of regional ingredients and the fact that around thirty different ingredients are contained in one bowl of deliciousness, is an authorised food provider for astronauts, including Mars explorers)! I suspect it is also a dish worthy of many a grand love story. Is there a Korean drama that does not contain at least one scene of an angsty love-ridden couple (driven apart by parents/work/life circumstances only to have found each other years later thanks to Naver and a chance meeting at one of the thousand coffee shops next to the subway station that they both get on at) staring into each others eyes as they methodically mix their bibimbap? I think not. Who could not help but fall in love with another over a dish of thinly sliced vegetables, in a pleasing array of colours, perfectly placed on top of generously sesame oiled up rice? Proof is provided by an American-Korean friend who confessed to me (and a carload of other Korean-Americans as we sped down the Gangnam Expressway on our way, conveniently, to eat bibimbap) that her husband fell in love with her because of how she ate her bibimbap - apparently very quickly (the eating that is, not the love, which has continued).

My own flirtation with bibimbap has developed (matured could be a more appropriate word but that would be admitting that I may have been immature in the first place) in the two years I have been here. At first, I didn't appreciate the subtlety and the complexity of the dish. I saw only carrots and cucumbers, some stringy mushrooms, a raw egg and rice. And I saw them separately. Oh, how wrong was I. Bibimbap is a dish that comes with a need - to be stirred with chopsticks prior to eating (I am told that direction does not matter but you must jumble up and around without squishing the rice). The mixture is crucial because the whole point of this seemingly simple dish is to blend the yin and the yang - to achieve a perfect harmony of five colours (red, green, yellow, white and black which represent the five elements (tree, earth, fire, water and gold)) and five flavours (sweet, salt, savoury, spicy and bitter). Achieving this harmony can only be done when you mix.

For the past two years I have fought against the mixing. If you are my husband you would most likely link my aversion to stirring to some obsessive, controlling personality trait and you would also throw in something about me having severe subjugation issues but I say he reads too much into it (we are talking about bibimbap here, not marriage). However, I do now acknowledge that I have not been doing myself any favours by, sometimes aggressively, refusing to stir, particularly because not stirring can cause great angst to the people who deliver the bibimbap. Here is an interaction I have had several times now with Bibimbap Man at Namdaemun Market:

Me: Order bibimbap in very bad Korean (which basically exists of pointing at the picture of bibimbap on the menu and adding a very feeble please in Korean).

Bibimbap Man: Yells order back at me, walks off and returns a few minutes later to laden the table with Korean condiments and, a few minutes after that, brings me a most excellent bowl of super goodness, aka bibimbap.

Me: Start prodding at the bowl with chopsticks (my chopstick proficiency is just slightly higher than my Korean language level).

Bibimbap Man: After watching me from afar, sighs very loudly, hastily heads towards me, grabs my chopsticks and starts to mix.

Me: Decisively but not quite aggressively (more like the zeal of a random adjuma energetically and emphatically zipping up an undone jacket on one of my children), grab chopsticks back off him and say "It's OK" (this is one of my few and very well used phrase in Korean) but Bibimbap Man either does not understand my stab at the impossibly hard Korean language or chooses not to hear me and keeps stirring, looking at me like I am offending the entire restaurant by not doing so. "Why no stir?" he asks me with his eyes.

Me: "I like having the ability to choose when to stir and what to stir", I say back (although, because I have to say this in English it is not understood and I am getting nowhere).

Bibimbap Man: Throws chopsticks back at me in disgust and orders me out of shop to never return again. "If you do not stir your bibimbap, you will eat no bibimbap", I hear him say (although given I can't speak Korean he could have also said to me "Thanks for coming and you look lovely today" but somehow I think not).

But that was before, in a life I now refer to as "Life: Pre-Bibimbap."

Life: Pre-Bibimpap was a time when I did not eat kim (seaweed), rice was an after thought to the meal and consumed maybe once a fortnight, I would not drink lukewarm green tea as an accompaniment to the meal and I was utterly useless when it came to sharing dishes (you might call it selfish but if I ordered one dish off the menu than that was the one, and only, dish that I wanted to eat). And I would never have brought gochujang (fermented, red chile paste) to add to my dishes.

We went home to Australia for Christmas and three weeks without any Korean food proved to be a real challenge (although we travelled home to Australia with kim. I ate it all (yes, ALL) the day we arrived). The day after we arrived back to Korea I dropped the kids off at school and went straight to our local orange fronted store (kind of like your local bakery) and ate a steaming hot bowl of Kimchi jjigae (kimchi stew) and that night I added gochujang to my pesto pasta (what is a bowl of pesto pasta without gochujang? It is nothing I tell you - nothing!). The next day, friends from Australia came to visit, (super lovely people and I would highly recommend them to anyone as house guests, especially because on day three they bought a karaoke machine so we had norebang at our house every night. Word of warning - they slightly rigged the machine as there is no way Linda Brown (not her real name (ok so it might be) top scored with a 95 for a Billy Joel song!!! I played tour guide and, because I was so excited about being back in the land of fermented bean paste and red pepper sauce and because they love eating, their two week visit basically became a food lovers guide to Seoul. 

Here is a sample of the food we consumed.

Kimchi, mandu, kimchi, pickled daikon, kimchi, pork chop chey noodles, hoddeok (korean doughnut filled with sweet cinnamon sauce and crushed peanuts), fried chicken, udon noodles, donkatsu (fried pork), korean bbq, more korean bbq, mexican (pulled pork kimchi fries were a favourite), margaritas, Cass beer, kimbap,  tacos, the whole desert bar at Top Cloud restaurant, breakfast burgers from the school cafeteria, pancakes and hash browns, liquid nitrogen ice-cream, spun honey, corn in a cup, on the cob, from a can (our friends are corn addicts), frozen yoghurt, salted caramel pecan popcorn, hot chocolate, mint hot chocolate, caramel hot chocolate, vanilla hot chocolate (any variety of hot chocolate), honey bread, chocolate bread, pomegranates, boxes, boxes, boxes and boxes of Jeju mandarines, grapes, grapes and more grapes. And bibimbap. 

Of course, I took them to eat the very Korean meal of bibimbap. Pretending to be totally all over life in South Korea, I explained that the dish must be mixed. Because I was on a high (most likely because of all the food we were consuming during our two week orgy of Korean goodness) I decided I was also ready to mix (and also because I did not wanting to appear hypocritical). My chopsticks clumsily jumbled all the ingredients up together, the gooey egg dissipating yellowness throughout the bowl, the carrots mixing with the mushrooms, mixing with the cucumbers, the gochujang, lavishly heaped on top, staining the white rice red as I mixed.  The result? As has been my experience with most Korean dishes I have eaten (with the exception of live octopus), there can be no turning back. While this does not translate to me ceding any control or authority (to husband anyway - let's not get catrried away with ourselves just yet), it does mean that I can go back to Bibimbap Man and agree to let him vigorously mix my bowl of goodness because life post-bibimbap (stirred) is a happy, happy place. Shame for my friends that they had to leave. I'm not sure I ever can.