When someone asks me what is my favorite Korean food, the answer is gimbap! I came to Korea for the first time last year and when I tried gimbap, I fell in love with the taste from the first bite.
 There are three main reasons why I love gimbap. First, it comes with different fillings and flavors from normal gimbap (a roll of rice with various fillings, wrapped in seaweed) to bulgogi gimbap and galbi gimbap. The best part of it is that you can change the flavor based on your taste buds! Just ask the ajumma to add or take out the filling to match with your taste. My all-time favorite is tuna gimbap and gyeranmari gimbap (a roll with a of egg outside the seaweed). Besides, for a gimbap maniac like me, tasting different types of gimbap everywhere I go is a must and leads me to the fact that the taste of gimbap can change even with a slight change in the ingredients. For example, tuna gimbap with a spread of mayonnaise or without mayonnaise, the amount of rice, the texture of the rice, the filling, and the types of seaweed surprisingly determine how the taste will turn out to be. For me, that is why gimbap is special; only a small change in the ingredients can a new flavor, all based on the choices I can make based on my taste buds. And who knows?

In the future, gimbap will be globalized, thus leading to fusion gimbap with a combination of other ingredients from foreign food. I have been thinking of making my own gimbap with Malaysian flavors once I return back to Malaysia!
 Second, buying gimbap won’t take you more than three minutes. I remembered learning about “Foreigner perceptions of Korean people” in one of my Korean language classes at Sogang University. One of the most obvious things is the attitude of 빨리 빨리 (the concept that Korean people always want to do something fast) among Koreans. Especially during the peak hour of the day, you can see people running in the subway station not even bothering to glance to the right or to the left. And then it strikes me: “No wonder I can see lots of working people and students buying gimbap for their breakfast and eating it while waiting for the subway. Gimbap is the perfect meal for someone who is on the move, be it workers, school children, or travelers.” I was wondering, what if there was no gimbap, what will Korean people eat if they need something quick and easy? I can’t think of any other Korean food that matches so perfectly with the concepts of 빨리 빨리, healthy, fast, and handy other than gimbap.
 Third, the availability. I believe most people would agree with me if I say we can find a stall selling gimbap every 400 meters. I find it really interesting because, despite having other restaurants selling other types of Korean foods, fast food, and foreign cuisine, stalls selling gimbap still can be found and yet they are still competitive. Every time I walk past a gimbap stall I can see many people regardless of their age and social status having gimbap as their daily meal. It shows that, in the face of the influx of other cultures, Koreans are still holding fast to their culture of eating gimbap.
 For me, that is the wonder of gimbap: It is nutritious, affordable, and available everywhere, and that makes it have such a great impact on Korean people’s daily life, as well as on people like myself. These are my personal experiences and thoughts on gimbap as a foreigner who has been living in Korea for almost a year. Gimbap is not a mere food but also a representation of the culture and the social condition of Korean people themselves. For foreigners who are coming to Korea, not having gimbap is equal to not having a real taste of Korea.

Nuur Israa Kamarudin
2014 KF Korean Language Fellow