In Austria during the post-war reconstruction years, when foreigners were few and bicultural couples rare, a young Austrian girl and a Korean student met and fell in love. They were determined to overcome all obstacles in order to build a life together. This is their story.
(Read Part One of this heart-warming story first.)
By Waltraud Kim
Waltraud and Leo's marriage ceremony.
After our marriage in 1970 we stayed in Austria for a while. Leo got a good job as an engineer in a small city at the center of Austria.
The first years were pretty hard. We could only meet on weekends, as I did not give up my job at first. But in general life was the same as if I had married a “real” Austrian. My husband was very eager to adapt to the Austrian life style. There was only one thing which he missed a lot: Korean food.
Austrian food was too heavy and too tasteless for him. He missed the spices and his kimchi, a pickled cabbage with a lot of garlic and pepper. In Korea one cannot imagine a day without kimchi.
So one day he made it himself. He took a big pot, cabbage and a tremendous amount of garlic and salt and a lot of peppers. After one or two days, when the kimchi starts to ferment, the result is usually a spicy, delicious pickle which, indeed, you would not want to miss – if it is prepared correctly!
But his kimchi was something even more special: it was prepared by a student without any cooking experience and with Austrian spices, which are very different from Korean spices. The result was simply – well…. When he first opened the kimchi pot after two days of ripening, I almost fainted. An intense smell of fermented garlic streamed through the room. He had obviously added more garlic than cabbage! The kimchi smell somehow managed to fill your stomach even before you even tried it. The taste was even more exotic. It was like eating a spoonful of garlic with salt.
“I took more salt than usual, just to be safe, to preserve it better,” he said. At first I had enough of kimchi. After a lot of trial and error, we managed to prepare some really good kimchi and a miracle happened: I started to like it too!
One day, when Leo still was a student, he called me to tell me that something really terrible had happened. The most terrible thing had struck him since he came to Austria. Alarmed by his excited voice, I visited him.
When he opened the door, he held an open tin can in his hands, his pale face expressed horror and disgust. I had seen that tin can often in his kitchen before and it contained delicious Gulash, which is an Austrian specialty. He bought it often because he claimed it came close to the taste of a Korean dish.
“I just read the label more closely,” he said with disgust.
“Why, is it cat food?” I asked.
“No, worse, much worse,” he said ”It is – horse meat!”
At that time there were a few horse-meat shops in Vienna. Horse meat was even considered healthy, but today you hardly can find any shop at all as no one eats horse meat anymore. It was Leo’s fate that there was one shop on the way home from his university, where he used to go to picked up a can, thinking it was Gulash…
