Tagged with buddhism

How to travel as a vegan (and a reaction to Anthony Bourdain)

I’ve hitch-hiked, couchsurfed, camped, stayed in hostels lived in more than a few countries. All as a vegan. Unsurprisingly, when I started eating a plant-based diet it was one of the things I worried about most, as I already loved travel. I wouldn’t say that I had an opinion as extreme as Anthony Bourdain (an opinionated chef) in my pre-vegan days, but the motives behind refusing hospitality weren’t exactly ones I understood. Here’s a taste of his eloquent, beautifully phrased sentiments:

“They make for bad travelers and bad guests. The notion that before you even set out to go to Thailand, you say, ‘I’m not interested,’ or you’re unwilling to try things that people take so personally and are so proud of and so generous with, I don’t understand that, and I think it’s rude. You’re at Grandma’s house, you eat what Grandma serves you.”

You think that’s bad? Here’s what he says about vegans:

“Being a vegan is a first-world phenomenon, completely self-indulgent.”

Excuse me while I go into the corner until I stop laughing. This statement is so ironic to me that I can’t even take it as an insult. For the record, though, I don’t eat what my Grandma cooks when I visit. I cook her vegan food, and even though she complains a little, she eats it and I’m pretty sure enjoys it.

I was worried about seeming like a bad guest, though. I’ve done some thinking since then. When was the last time you saw an article called ‘reasons Jews and Muslims are bad travellers because it’s not Kosher and Halal.’ (Opinions on Halal meat, again, save for another day.) The difference being, religious diets often hold a respect that vegetarian/vegan ones don’t. I’m still waiting to see an article called ‘Why the Buddha makes a bad traveler and guest, and if he visits me he’ll eat beef and thank me for being generous.’ Think that’s going to happen?

Probably not.

What Bourdain handily looks past is that respect it a two way street. When I travel I am more than open to immersing myself in their culture, their language, and their food. As long as no animals are harmed. And I hope that they can respect that, just as I in turn respect their religions and customs. So far the only people who it seems to offend… are those sitting at home.

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Top to bottom, left to right: a ‘haggis’ and cranberry panini at a cafe on an island in the North of Scotland, a ripe papaya for dinner in Taiwan, an extortionately expensive raw vegan patty burger in London, and an amazing traditional style thing in Brno, Czech Republic.

How to eat when you’re a broke vegan travelling

Emergency food I travel with in my bag:

Rye bread (if possible, easy to find in Europe, not so in Asia), peanut butter, vegetable spreads/pates, bananas, apples, trail-mix and/or nuts. Sometimes there’s also a potato and an onion in there to cook at a host’s.

A standard day’s food on the road:

Breakfast: Fruit of some sort, usually bananas. I’ll add in bread or have oatmeal if I’m feeling super hungry.

Lunch: Some restaurants will have a vegetable soup, often I can find something involving noodles. I can usually find fruit or veg, or peanut butter and crackers when all else fails.

Dinner: Happy Cow is a godsend. I can usually find somewhere in any city I’m in that does vegan food. If I’m cooking, I’ll often do a potato/onion/mushroom/tofu fry up which is quick, cheap, and I can find the ingredients almost anywhere in the world. I carry small bags of spices in my backpack to add, carefully packaged.

I’m not good at being hungry. And I like hot meals. Couchsurfing is usual for travelling as a vegan because I can often find at least a vegetarian to stay with, or the person is willing to translate when we go out for food so I know what I’m eating.

The main thing is prepare, prepare, prepare. Make sure you have a few granola/cliff bars stashed away, so that when an emergency happens you’re okay. I’m a purist within reason, too – if there’s bread on offer, I’ll check it’s not been friend in lard or something, but I’m often a little more flexible about it containing milk or egg if I can’t tell and there’s nothing else. Chances are, it’s vegan. Better that than something that definitely has animal products in it.

Bottom line is, I’ve made it this far. And it only gets easier to travel as a vegan. It shouldn’t be a reason to put you off – veganism or travelling. And vegan food tourism is a fantastic way to see a city. Hunting down that little vegan place down a back alley in a city leads you past amazing places that you might never have experienced had you settled for the omni-place on the high-street. There are ways, there are means, and there are rewards.

P.s., here’s the full Anthony Bourdain article if you feel like it.

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The New Year resolution revolution.

Today a woman stopped me in the street on my way out of the metro, as I was trying to cross the road to get to my apartment, and food. “Do you know how to be happy?” she asked, smiling unnaturally and handing me a flier. I’ve been homesick all week thanks to working Christmas, I haven’t had a day off other than Sundays in several months, and I’m going through an ‘I hate my job, I’d rather be anywhere else but here’ phase. It will pass, but strangely enough when my blood sugar is on a downward spiral and there’s a strange woman keeping me from my food… that’s not something I remember.

I think I may have muttered ‘no,’ rather offishly, and looked pointedly at the lights willing them to change.

She handed me a leaflet: ‘Keys to a Happy Life.’ As I walked up the stairs I realised she was a Jehovah’s Witness. They’ve made it to Asia now? Where do I have to move to escape them?

Which, of course, has me thinking about happiness. My personal happiness project has slipped a little this month, thanks to aforementioned burn out and lack of festive spirits. I’ve been mainly focusing on getting out bed in the morning, and on not crying at work when a kid makes my life difficult on Christmas day, and I look on Facebook to see friends and family having Christmas as it should be. Whatever, it’s been hard, but it’s not like I ever thought it would be easy.

Onwards and upwards, and here comes 2015. There are many arguments for why New Year’s resolutions don’t work. The easiest comparison to make about them is that they’re like diets. They’re a short-term fix rather than a lifestyle change, and people quickly slip and pile back on the pounds, or the broken resolutions. Here’s a link that will send you to a study on New Year’s Resolutions, with the statistics that 60% of them fail, mainly after the first week. A plethora of articles across the internet advise making small changes that are attainable. This seems logical enough. But I’m going to go back to the Happiness Project here for inspiration, or what I termed my ‘Buddhism Project‘.

Sure, setting a small goal may be easier to keep, but it’s also easier to discard. I like the idea of stepped changes. Like Gretchen Rubin adds a new set of changes every month, I like to have an end goal that is fairly considerable, but broken down into manageable steps. Losing a total of 40 pounds can be broken down into 3-5pounds a month, for instance, which is achievable and also allows room for failure on one or two of the months.

Another article, published only about 15 hours earlier than this blog post, says that New Year’s resolutions are procrastinating something you should be starting today. Sure, if it’s losing weight or quitting smoking maybe. I personally like the idea of a concrete date to make a change, though, and here’s where the revolution aspect of resolutions comes in: using the last few days of the old year to properly take time to reflect on your life is valuable time to think over what realistically needs changing, and how to do it. I like the word revolution for its double meaning: typically we think of revolutions as an uprising against a political power, but the word originally come from the Latin ‘revolutio,’ meaning turn around. A new year is a fresh start, a revolution, or a turn around. A reason to look at what hasn’t been working, and what has been working but could work better. I like to think of it as a chance to refocus: to look at where I’ve gone off track this year, and to work on pulling things back in.

For me, this year has been somewhat stale. This may seem odd as I’ve graduated and moved to Asia in 2014, but in terms of having a direction in life I’ve actually backtracked. This was mainly due to a messy break up and my somewhat rash decision to flee the country when, excuse the phrase, I was so confused about what was happening in my life that I couldn’t tell my arse from my elbow. Suddenly I was in Taiwan going ‘how did I get here? What?’ Strangely enough, this is a common story here. In many ways this year has been a huge turning point in my life, but most of it has been spent trying to figure things out, remembering how to be alone, getting good at being alone again, losing the ability, regaining it, and dealing with a full time job involving lots of very very small humans who don’t speak my language.

In conclusion, I’m currently working on my list of New Year’s resolutions. Nowhere does losing weight feature, or quitting smoking. I don’t smoke so that’s a no-brainer, but you get the principle. My main challenge is to be more productive with my time, so that I can manage to fit a life of my own in around my job. I’m starting with getting up earlier. Not much earlier, just an hour or so. Then I’ll try and be productive in that hour. Then I’m going to get up a little earlier still until I can fit in a decent amount of exercise, or a blog post, or some Chinese. I’ve been working on phasing out TV series’ (on my laptop, I haven’t watched an actual TV in a long time) for a while. It’s going pretty well, but then it’s an ongoing process, not sudden cold Turkey.

While there’s no reason not to do this throughout the year, I personally like the concrete milestone provided by the New Year, and the inevitable reflection on the past year that we all find ourselves doing. I don’t believe New Year’s resolutions are worthless, or procrastination. They’re a way of starting as you mean to go on, of staging a revolution against what isn’t working, and of turning around and refocusing the things that are but could do better.

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Don’t eat meat? “Peace, man.” Being vegan in Taiwan.

This morning I was tutoring one of my lovely private students, a 40 something year old woman called May who has an irrepressible sense of fun, and appalling English grammar that she refuses to work on. For some reason, we spent the entire hour discussing religion, including me making a rather hesitant and unsuccessful attempt to explain the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, and the differences in the hierarchies in both churches. I’m not very religious; I stopped going to church when I was 7 so that I could go and drink hot chocolate in the coffee shop across the street with my dad. I guess you could say I converted to worshipping at the alter of coffee shops at an early age.

Inevitably, Taiwan being a partially Buddhist country, the subject of Buddhism came up. “Do you know they have their own TV channel, their own restaurants, and their own hospital?” she asked me. I nodded. “And,” she learned forwards and dropped her voice to a whisper, as though preparing to impart a terrible secret, “Buddhists in Taiwan… don’t eat meat!” She leaned back in her chair so she could see the full impact of this revelation on me. “Well neither do I,” I said, smiling. She slapped her thighs loudly and laughed as if I’d just said the most hilarious thing. “They believe killing is bad!” She said. I nodded, “so do I.” “And some of them,” she lowered her voice again to rev up, “won’t even eat milk and eggs because they believe it hurts the animal!” I nodded. “But fish?” I shook my head. “Onions and garlic?” This is a common question in Taiwan when I say I don’t eat meat. Buddhists believe that Alliums, the family of plants to which onions and garlic belong, stimulate the blood too much which raises the emotions: so they don’t eat them. “I eat onions and garlic, just nothing from animals.” May leaned back fully and squinted at me, thinking hard. “You know,” she said at last, “my Aunt doesn’t eat anything from animal, so I know lots of places. There’s a good one on the second floor of Sonjiang Nanjing MRT station.” And just like that, we returned to the surreal lesson topic. This is typical of the reactions I’ve had here. Confusion about fish and meat, then question about onions and garlic, then concern about how I’m managing, then recommendations for places to eat. My favourite reaction was from one of the women who works at my school, who just said “Oh,” nodded grimly, then said “peace!” and gave me the peace symbol.

According to Wikipedia, 13% of Taiwan identifies as being vegetarian. This is the largest population of vegetarians anywhere in the world, and it was one of the reasons I chose Taiwan to move to. A lot of the vegetarians here are inconspicuous and over 50. The Buddhist buffets, of which there are many, are packed full every lunch and dinner and even those who eat meat will choose to eat in vegetarian places from time to time. At the large Buddhist buffets that are all you can eat and cost an arm and a leg, you can find everything you can imagine. Because it’s for religion, not health, in general the Taiwanese have chosen to recreate meats and fish with soy. I avoid soy and replacement meats as much as possible, but it’s been quite surreal to see what looks like chicken and fish, complete with scaly skin, on the buffet platters.

typical fare at an upmarket veggie buffet

Typical fare at an upmarket veggie buffet

Although it’s easy enough to be a vegan here, being a healthy vegan has presented far more of a challenge. In past year, and even in the 6 months since I’ve moved here, veganism as a health craze is visibly starting to take off. Restaurants such as Herban, Miss Green, Mianto and Ooh Cha Cha are championing healthy, fresh and often raw vegan food that is worlds away from the greasy fake fish and tired vegetables on the buffets. The catch, naturally, is that this Western style vegan food comes with a Western price tag. I now cook mainly for myself, because eating out all the time was making a choice between running down my health with the amount of oil and soy, or running out of money.

Vegan brunch at Herban kitchen, by Zhongxiao Dunhua.

Vegan brunch at Herban kitchen, by Zhongxiao Dunhua.

Since I changed to being vegan over two years ago, I’ve lived in Berlin and Glasgow, and hitchhiked all round Central Europe. Apart from an uncomfortable experience at a Bier Garten in Munich surrounded by an entire abattoir worth of roast pig, the experience has been fairly plain sailing. Vegan life in Taiwan is getting easier and easier, and I’m excited to see what the next year presents. If nothing else, it’s just a nicer quality of reaction I get from people than the usual ones in Europe.

Peace.

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The Buddhism Project

Because I’m making it one of my Taiwan goals not to acquire possessions, I only allow myself to buy one book a month, and only then if I’ve finished my previous books. The suitcases of unread books I had to rehome before I left Glasgow were heartbreaking, and also a huge loss of money.

My book this month was ‘The Happiness Project’, by Gretchen Rubin. Although she and I live very different lives (she an established writer with two children living well in New York, I a semi-nomadic, single twenty-something teacher in East Asia) I’m getting a lot out of the book – a lot more than I expected. She tackles a different aspect of her happiness each month: children, marriage, friends, time, and learns what is and isn’t manageable. For instance, she has to come to terms with the things that aren’t ‘Gretchen’: things she wants to enjoy, feels she should enjoy, but in reality just doesn’t. This realisation closes a lot of doors, as admitting that you’re never going to be a lawyer, or an ambassador, or fluent in French, is sealing off possibilities.

It’s been making me think a lot about how I’m guilty of velleities. Things which I dream I’m capable off, and that I say I’m going to do, but which I just don’t because there aren’t that many hours in a day, and it’s not a priority. I always mean to read up more on political affairs in the Middle East, but I’d rather read an article on health, or on women’s rights. Although the Middle East does interest me, it’s not the broad political picture but rather the lives of the people living there that I want to spend time looking into. I do have time for another 3 private students a week, but I don’t want to be someone who only works, and I wouldn’t have time for yoga. It would be great to get up and do Beachbody Insanity on my rooftop every morning before work but I have to get up early enough for me as it is, and I’d rather have the extra time in bed – so I should stop setting my alarm for an unrealistic hour and then snoozing it 15 times.

More than anything it made me aware of how often I vocalise my negative thoughts, and then how they become more than thoughts, but how they start to become part of how I live my day. My job is repetitive and time consuming. I have sung the same song every single week day morning for the past 4 months, and I have another 5 months of it to go, along with various others that I have on a small rotation. I know the exact formula of the lesson I will teach with my bushiban classes each day. On the whole, the classes run like slightly dysfunctional clockwork (dysfunctional because there are kids involved, but clockwork nonetheless) and it didn’t take me very long to work out a routine that would allow me to prep for the minimum amount of time, while still teaching a class that would keep the kids interested and engaged. It is certainly not the most stimulating of jobs, although it is made a lot more bearable by having kids whom I like almost without exception.

Like Gretchen Rubin, I have decided to embark upon my project but with more specific goals. I’m trying to be more conscious of my negativity, and I’m going to try to set myself little challenges to make my days more fulfilling. The areas that I’m going to start with are: friendships, relationships, work life, free time. It will be a work in progress. I’m calling it the Buddhism project because one of the biggest things that’s made a change to my happiness in the past month is starting to meditate, and that’s a practice I’m going to try to maintain. Onwards and upwards.

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