2009

I want to write recent stuff, but in order to maintain the chronology, need to update things a bit. So, go with 2009 first. As mentioned in the end of the previous, we got back to Beijing, and indeed stayed there the whole year. There are a few new restaurants and now the vegan club has reactivated, but otherwise it's much as before. Large, crowded, polluted, but friendly and with excellent food.

We did have a summer holiday in the Nordic countries though. In Tampere, Finland, the only vegan restaurant I mentioned earlier went bankrupt, sadly. That reduced the eating out options to one vegetarian restaurant, and even that open only during lunch time on weekdays. Quality not really worth cheering about either.

In Beijing there came and went a favourite restaurant, the Loving Vegetarian, which there's probably no need to review as it is indeed gone. The Vegan Social Club continued meetings, but rather than regular meetings in restaurants, potlucks in member's houses became the norm.

With reduced travel funding there wasn't an awful lot of that either. But there was Isabel's first visit to Europe in the summer, visiting Finland, Sweden, and Norway. While most of the time went in Finland, probably the most special part was visiting the fjords in Norway. We went over land and sea; Stockholm is quite good for veggie people but I'll get back to that on the more recent things, and Oslo was ok also. From there we took the train to Bergen, a beautiful town by the water but not so great food-wise.

Then we went by boat over to Flåm, with gorgeous fjord scenery all around. Flåm had even less when it comes to food, but the big hotel in town would cook decent veggie food and grilling something outside was always an option. We went kayaking, saw porpoises, and had lots of fun!

Back in China in the autumn we made another trip to Sichuan, but never mind that, wanting to get on to a bit more recent things. Here's a couple more photos from 2009 though.