Vegan Brunches

One of the reasons I haven't written for a while has been the sheer number of great veggie events recently! First there was the animal rights concert in Wudaokou, to be continued with a concert tour around China (assuming we can raise the funds for that). The club has also switched to three weekly meetings now, with the potluck Sunday brunch being the best of all! It seems our group has some excellent cooking talents. Here's a sample of what was on offer yesterday:

Otherwise it's been lots of work, sports, and dancing. Speaking of which, I shall now return to the least exciting one of the three.

Malaysia

恭喜发财！Happy Rat Year! The Chinese New Year passed again, here in China that means several things:

1. A 7-day public holiday. Yay! (Well, it's 3 days really, just combined with weekend work.)
2. Totally sold out public transport.
3. An incredible amount of firecrackers and fireworks with which people blow up a year's savings. It's a war zone, and your ears are the victims.

Hence, I used #1 to escape from #2 and #3. To Malaysia, because I've never been there before, it's not dreadfully expensive, and it's warm. Arriving in Kuala Lumpur the taxi driver pointed out a crowd queuing for tickets and a sense of familiarity came up, but fortunately it wasn't anywhere near as bad over there. At least after the very first day train and coach tickets were available, there were very few firecrackers, and many businesses stayed open. KL is quite a modern city with at least passable public transport and everything you'd expect in a big city. But nothing overly exciting, what I wanted was the seaside. I was told by a local vegetarian couchsurfer that the nicest beaches, such as Tioman island, were closed due to monsoon season and the best available would be Langkawi.

Therefore, after glancing at Wikitravel, I decided I'd go by train to Butterworth, use the ferry to Penang, then another ferry to Langkawi, and figure things again there. So here's my first bit of Malaysian travel advice to you: Don't take the train, use the coaches! The train was about 4 hours late, really slow, and while ok, not as comfortable as the coaches. Given the late arrival, I decided to stay overnight in Butterworth. My second advice to you is: Don't stay overnight in Butterworth! There's nothing there, and I mean also no decent accommodation. At least I couldn't find any. I ended up in a hotel (the only one I saw) which admittedly was quite cheap, but that's about all the praise I can give it. I guess it was used primarily for prostitution.

This picture from Butterworth demonstrates that Malaysia has a very international feel to it, not only thanks to tourism but also the multicultural population of Malay, Chinese, and Indian people. All of which made it largely quadrilingual, with signage often in Malay (sometimes written with both Latin and Arabic scripts), Chinese, Tamil, and English. Lots of people seemed to speak good English, too many in fact, to put my Malay in test.

The ferry-ride to Penang is really short and nothing to write home about. It arrives in Georgetown, which is a reasonably-sized city and has plenty of accommodation options available. Cheap sleeps are in Chinatown. A cheap single room in much of Malaysia seemed to be around the rate of 30 - 40 RM or around 6 to 9 euros per night (a tad more in KL). This usually means shared showers and toilets. Well, Georgetown is famous for food, and they do indeed also have vegetarian restaurants! Unfortunately many were closed due to Chinese New Year, but I ran into an open one while walking lots in the city as always, and it was a very good one. I'll figure out the address later. Penang island also has some beaches, and that was one major reason to go to Malaysia so I rushed off to the nearest one. It was ok, there were horses, all the usual beach activities (jet skis, paragliding, etc), expensive beach bars, quite a lot (but not overcrowded) of people, and nice sand and warm water.

Penang was good, but when I get on to the travelling around mode I tend to just keep going. Hence I headed off to Langkawi the following morning. That's a much longer ferry ride, about 3 hours, but not too bad, leaving around 8 AM daily. Langkawi had me immediately admiring its beauty, well, as soon as I got out of the awful shopping centre the ferry drops people in. It's a real paradise island with endless white sand beaches, coconut trees and monkeys running around. It's even a tax haven. I soon started regretting not booking accommodation in advance as I didn't know where to go, but luckily Zackry's Guesthouse had a dorm bed free, for just 15 RM. Later I noticed there are plenty of motels around the island pricing rooms to the neighbourhood of 40 RM, even with private showers and during the Chinese New Year.

What comes next is easy to guess. The beach. The endless white sand beaches with the rolling waves of the ocean were so inviting I spent the next few days largely in the water. Swimming for hours, but I did also go island hopping, saw lots of cute monkeys, plenty of eagles, even more of those crab-like little things that make the holes in the sand (what are they called?), and went kayaking around the island. And got my phone broken while heading back. All this, while watching the sailboats around, made want even more to get my own sailboat! Well, some day.





What I haven't really brought up yet is food. I was expecting something similar to Indonesia where things with tempeh and tofu were all around. But to my disappointment I didn't find that at all in Malaysia. It seems the wonders of tempeh goreng or even tahu goreng are very much limited to Indonesia. The Malay food was largely infested with fish sauce, and Langkawi was a pretty bad place for that, the island is full of restaurants advertising sea food. The exception is the 'capital', Kuah, where they do have a vegetarian café at least, but I was on the other side of the island. However, there is a large Indian population in Malaysia and of course that means there is Indian veg food to be found, almost anywhere. Including Langkawi, but to my shock when I took the ferry out and went to the capital of Kedah province, Alor Star, that city seems to have no Indian people nor restaurants nor vegetarian options! So I had to rely on my well-trained stomach to go a day without food and not complain.

Indeed, beach holidays are fun but after a little while you do want something more. Like something to do after the sun goes down. Or, if you burn your skin, something more to do even when the sun is up. And definitely, some good food, for the selection in the Indian places (none of which was pure veg) on Langkawi is limited. So I decided to head south to Singapore. It is true Singapore has overly strict punishments, and it's quite disturbing that they do the largest number of capital punishments in the world (in relation to the population), but even so I do like that city. It's a city where you can be dropped anywhere, walk around randomly for half an hour, and run into at least one vegetarian restaurant. Where it's constantly warm, all year round. Where public transport works and goes everywhere. Where multiple cultures mix without clashes. Where Asian cultures can be met without the bothersome foreigner label you get elsewhere and things are pushed at you because of it. Where cars stop for pedestrians going across the road. Where homelessness seems largely a solved problem. Friendly people, beautiful places, and general cleanness, and all services available all the time. It's just comfortable.

And my favourite place in Singapore is Sentosa island. Fine, the beaches aren't as great as Langkawi by a long shot, but they're still far better than anything a Finn would dare to dream about. And you can go to the city in the evening to dance tango. And eat in various vegetarian restaurants in styles of any culture. Or whatever else you might want to do.


After a couple of days of heavy eating in Singapore I headed back to Kuala Lumpur in order to get back home. I got one of those tickets for the hop-on, hop-off tourist buses going around the city, and it seemed just the thing for a day visit. The Lake Gardens were nice, especially the Hibiscus and Orchid gardens there. And the Petronas Towers actually do look quite nice, especially at night. So, overall, a great trip, and Malaysia as well as Singapore are certainly along the top of my recommended travel destinations. The rest of the pictures are here.

“Don’t Eat Friends” Concert, March 8, in Beijing

The Chinese animal advocacy and vegan outreach group Don't Eat Friends (founded by Giant Beanstalk lead singer Xie Zheng), will be playing an awareness-raising concert promoting veganism on Saturday March 8, at 9pm, at the 13 Club in Wudaokou, in Beijing's University District.

The general theme of this concert is that the health of our planet and our bodies could benefit enormously from a more compassionate and ethical relationship with our fellow earthlings.

The name of Xie's group Don't Eat Friends derives from his most common explanation when questioned about why he is a vegan: "Animals are my friends, and I don't eat my friends."

This will be the first concert of a planned ten-city tour of China to raise awareness about veganism and to highlight the problems of factory farming, animal experiments, moon bear "bile farming" and fur farming.

For details in Chinese: http://blog.sina.com.cn/biechipengyou
For details in English: http://vegansocialclub.com/?p=73

Vegan Beijing

Vegan Beijing is looking better and better these days. The most important development in that is the newly started Vegan Social Club. We have a vegan dinner every Thursday in a nice restaurant and also the vegan brunches on Sundays have become a nearly regular event. And the number of people keeps going up, our record is 28 people and a cat (the cat wasn't vegan, and actually not all the people were either, but at least interested) during a Sunday brunch, and yesterday we had more than 15 people at the dinner also, thanks to a group of Swedes joining us. It's awesome meeting so many compassionate and kind people at once! And each of course have their own interesting tales. Many are amazing chefs also, this picture is from the Mexican vegan brunch by Pat, not a great picture but certainly great food!

Otherwise I've been highly engaged in the moving issue, the office has moved to a faraway suburb without decent public transport and I don't know if I should move after it and be isolated from the world or move somewhere else and be isolated from the workplace. It doesn't help matters that Chinese housing agents are some of the most difficult to deal with people. If you ever look for housing here, do not expect service, expect to be abused, then you're prepared in roughly the correct way. Anyhow, it snowed yesterday. Beautiful. :-)

The Home of Santa

Happy 2008 to everyone! So, Christmas break and holiday to Finland. Finland is the best place for Christmas, or at least it is for me. The home of Santa Claus. I was feeling like him once again on the way over with the huge suitcase full of gifts. It always feels a little odd returning to Finland and hearing the familiar language everywhere. We headed almost straight to my father's kesämökki / summer cottage in Kihniö, a little town about 120 km from Tampere. I was saddened to see there was no snow and weather reports were saying there wouldn't be any, but fortunately it did snow a little so we didn't have a completely non-white Christmas. We went off to find a Christmas tree, and walking with the ax made me think whether plants can feel pain or not... hope not.

The Finnish Christmas celebration usually focuses on Christmas Eve (24th), but some of my siblings were coming only on the 25th so we delayed some things a little. At noon they announce peace for Christmas, after which they play the most militant song in Finland, quite grotesque actually. Around then people eat rice porridge with plum sauce. The porridge is made with milk but soya or oat milk works fine. After that, well, if you're all set otherwise, decorate the tree!

In the evening there's the Christmas dinner. This has three special casseroles only made at Christmas time: potato, swede, and carrot. The two latter mentioned ones are often vegan even in the traditional recipes (although some put cream in the swede casserole), the potato one has milk but again, soya or oat milk works fine. With those they generally eat ham. One of my sisters made a wonderful ham replacement from cold smoked tofu. Then there's a special Christmas bread (which is vegan) and salads or various other things... different families have different habits. The sweet section has Christmas tarts which have plum in them (vegan unless applied with egg for colour) and ginger biscuits (some are vegan, most have egg). And you drink glögi or glögg in Swedish... fruit juice with certain spices, heated up and often sharpened with wine or spirits. Much like mulled wine.

After that Santa comes, but as there was no-one of suitable age this time around, Santa passed us by and just left gifts under the tree. We didn't even open them before the others arrived on the 25th. The others included the main reason for getting over to Finland this time: the newborn baby of my brother. He takes after his father, just six weeks old and he could already speak a little bit of Arabic and Finnish, albeit only the word "no" in both languages. Pretty negative, then. :-P

The gifts were too many as usual, and after that it tends to be time for various kinds of games. Someone always gets games, and Christmas is the perfect time for playing them. One of the games was Scrabble, which is pretty interesting in Finnish because you can make all sorts of crazy words by combining them. Some of the creations were totally hilarious. The rules exclude conjugation forms as then it'd be one form after another, endlessly. Outside games are certainly in too, unfortunately this time there wasn't enough snow for regular winter games but being outside in the fresh air is good enough. Ah, and sauna, almost forgot that!

Roll over to New Year Eve then, as you may or may not know I turned vegan with my new year resolution of 1996 and hence it was a time to celebrate 12 years as a vegan. My tradition, albeit a relatively new tradition, is to celebrate with a meal in a vegan restaurant on New Year Eve. Last year it was the Millenium in San Francisco, this time it was Veganissimo in Tampere. The foods were amazing, the restaurant was far better than expected! The price level was rather normal for Finland, and actually ended up a lot cheaper than the meal at the Millenium despite more eaters this time.

All the photos are here, including nice photos of a lake, such as the here. Happy New Year!

Henan

One more entry before Christmas, this time on a work outing to Henan province. Henan means south of the river, referring to the Yellow River (Huanghe). This was a project kickdown... a project kickdown in Shaolin Temple sounds pretty scary, but we all made it back intact! Phew!

After a project related meeting in the province capital Zhengzhou we went off to the White Horse Temple. This is the first Buddhist temple in China and the first officially built Buddhist temple in the world, built around year 65 AD. In the temple there was a water pond and story has it if you can make a coin float on the water that will bring you blessings. I was the only one in our group who could, without reverting to placing the coin on top of anything else at least. So I guess there are great many blessings coming my way. :-)

From there we went to the Longmen Grottoes, a large area with tons of caves with thousands of Buddha statues in them. Lots of the statues had their heads or in some cases more than that missing, destroyed in the course of the centuries. But it was still very impressive.

After a night in Luoyang city we headed on to Shaolin Temple. Shaolin temple is famous for two things: it's the birthplace of Zen-Buddhism and then of course there's kungfu. Actually more than a decade ago my mother brought me a T-shirt from Denmark that said "中国少林" (Zhongguo Shaolin / Shaolin, China) on the back, and as I had never heard of Shaolin temple I wondered for years what was the meaning of this "China few forests" thing, thinking it may have been something environmental, haha. In the temple we saw a kungfu show, those guys are pretty impressive! Shaolin temple also has its own brand of vegan cookies that are available elsewhere in China also, and they're yummy.

The pictures are here.

Good Eating Vietnam!

It's pretty cold in Beijing these days so a conference trip to Hanoi was definitely welcome, and I reserved the weekends for exploring. The early December temperatures in northern Vietnam seemed to be around 20 degrees during the day, but a bit chilly for a t-shirt at night. Just like the Finnish summer weather really, only less rain, much shorter days and far more pollution. The conference people were nice enough to book a hotel, a tour to Halong Bay and even an airport pickup for us. The hotel in Hanoi was the Government Guest House, which at US$35 a night is rather expensive for Vietnam, but it was central and comfortable.

We started up by going to a tour of Halong Bay. It's a scenic seaside area about 170 km east from Hanoi, known in China as Guilin on water -- the readers outside China (Blogger is blocked in China so I suppose most readers would be elsewhere) may not know Guilin so I'll point you to the pictures I took there in 2005 for reference, here and here. The tour group consisted of me, one of my colleagues and two professors from Beijing, and our Vietnamese guide who spoke good English. Generally language skills seemed to be at a shortage in Vietnam, but people catering for a lot of tourists speak some English and most people in Halong Bay speak good Chinese, as it's pretty close to the border. Halong itself is a small city at the seaside and with the foggy weather that seems to be a common feature in the winter time the scenes weren't overly impressive, for the proper scenes you have to take a boat to see the thousands of islands.

The houses in Vietnam are quite interesting, they make relatively high and narrow buildings and paint the front... but not the sides that are a little less visible from the main street. In Hanoi these would be right next to one another, outside the city there's plenty of space between houses but they still make them quite narrow. We had a relaxing start for the tour, staying overnight in Halong before heading to see the islands. So we had dinner (food was rather similar to Chinese, and nothing extraordinary) and went to see the night market. It was quite lively, and prices are low. They also readily accepted the Chinese yuan in Halong, but not in Hanoi where they'd only take Vietnamese dong or US dollars... actually it bothered me quite a bit when people would tell me prices in US dollars when I don't have any and don't want any either! Vietnamese dong is one of those currencies that force you to learn even the big numbers in the local language and where you have to count the zeros in the bills to make sure you don't give them 100,000 rather than 10,000 dong. (1 CNY was a bit over 2,000 VND, therefore 1 EUR would be around 22,000 VND).

We got our own private boat, a big boat, to tour the islands. We started by seeing some limestone caves on one island, quite large caves although I've seen several bigger ones in China. Just like in China they were lighted with colourful lights to make them more impressive, but seemed to have less of a tendency of naming all the formations, or perhaps I just wasn't paying attention. Afterwards we continued on the boat to see quite a few islands pass by, the rock formations were indeed similar to the little mountains in Guilin, but perhaps due to the fog it didn't really look as impressive. Very nice nonetheless. The also made us a lunch on the boat, a pretty good one, too. The guide told us that Vietnam is one of these weird "socialist" countries just like China where people have to pay for the education, healthcare and so on. And they're actually really expensive, for example a year in the university (including living costs) apparently costs about 10,000 USD, and even in the highschool level it's around 1,000 USD a year! This is a lot of money in a country where the average salary in Hanoi is less than 250 USD per month, with a lot of people making a lot less. Apparently the government does offer free education to the poorest families though.

The three hour drive back to Hanoi was interrupted by a stopover at a place selling touristy things at very high prices, probably due to a deal with the tour company. But at least it was fun chatting with the staff who after my greeting thought I'd speak good Vietnamese, which, unfortunately, isn't the case. My Vietnamese seemed to be lacking at least as badly as my Korean, especially as people didn't seem to understand even my "Tôi là người ăn chay" (I'm vegetarian). I probably got my tones wrong, or then it's just so rare to be vegetarian that people look confused even if you do say it right.

In Hanoi even crossing the street is an adventure. There's heavy traffic in Beijing also, and drivers don't care much of the rules, but it's a lot worse in Hanoi... well, a lot different at least. The main difference is that rather than cars, the streets of Hanoi are filled with motorbikes. Unlike cars the motorbikes can navigate around people crossing the street, assuming they don't change pace suddenly. So that's what you do, forget your fears and just walk at a steady pace and watch the traffic magically go all around you. Worked amazingly well. We went off for a walk on the market streets nearby, filled with little shops selling all sorts of tourist crap and tours and people walking and selling fruits and French bread and asking you if you want to go somewhere by motorbike and of course swarms of tourists... it's very crowded and loud. We went for dinner at the Tamarind Cafe, which is a vegetarian restaurant right in the middle of this area. It seems almost all of the clientèle are foreigners, even the prices are only listed in USD. The food was pretty good, but unfortunately the vegan options were few and not clearly marked. They had a marking for foods that contain egg but no markings of the dairy that seemed to be infested in most of the dishes here, unlike the regular Vietnamese cuisine.

The next few days went with the conference... but a mention of the food. They had arranged lunches and dinners at a restaurant near the conference venue, and had a vegetarian table for me, 3 Indian and 2 Taiwanese people. The first lunch looked quite scary, it seemed they were serving us chicken and who knows what. Around came a rumour that those were mock meats and not real ones, but we shied away from them nonetheless. As we pointed out that we'd feel more comfortable with "regular vegetables", we did get those on the following meals. Ah, and breakfasts were at the hotel, the only vegetarian option without egg was French bread with jam and butter, which I always asked without butter but they only did so on the first morning. The butter was separate though, and in a tiny jar that I didn't open so hopefully they gave that to the next person rather than throwing it away. They also brought a yogurt to everyone despite it not being mentioned in the menu but hopefully they also gave my unopened one to the next person.

The conference organisers had also arranged for us a city tour, funnily enough in the evening, but the Ho Chi Minh square was a very interesting sight even in the dark. It seemed like a smaller version of Tian'anmen, with similar texts and a mausoleum for Ho Chi Minh. The main part of the square were smaller patches of grass, 79 of them, to celebrate the 79 years that Ho Chi Minh lived. Seemed a popular place for locals to take the kids to play also, safe from the traffic. After that we went to see a Vietnamese water puppet show, which apparently is a local tradition over 1,000 years old. It was really cute, much recommended when you visit Vietnam.


Originally I was planning hiking at Sapa after the conference, but Christmas shopping is a pain that must be dealt with every year, and it made more sense to do that in Hanoi than Beijing. Actually the couple of days there wasn't enough to find gifts for everyone as I did want to see some of the sights in Hanoi also. And that meant I could test the other vegetarian restaurants! While the food in those was similar to the Chinese vegetarian, there were enough differences to make it feel exciting, and a great idea that the Chinese vegetarian places don't have is the menu idea where you can order a meal for one consisting of a little bit of several dishes, at a price only a little bit above that of one dish. The sharing idea that they have in China is great when you have several people, but if you eat alone it gets really dull and you don't get to taste many things. These Vietnamese ones had both as you could order either way. Perfect.

I used the list of restaurants from Happycow. Dakshin would supposedly have been the nearest one but I couldn't find it, either it's been replaced by a regular Vietnamese restaurant or I'm blind or stupid or the address is wrong. I didn't go to the faraway places at all but rather visited Nang Tam twice, it was good enough to justify that. Adida was very nice also, with very good service, which I'm not saying just because the waitress called me handsome, honestly! :-P And one thing to note is that it is quite possible and easy to get vegan food from the regular restaurants as well, ok, I'm not saying I'd know with absolute certainty they don't use animal oils but at least the food tasted good. And while these vegetarian places (with the possible exception of Tamarind Cafe) are very reasonably priced also, eating in random places costs next to nothing. During a long walk from shop to shop and sight to sight it's quite relaxing to just stop at a corner bar, sit outside on the terrace and have a couple of beers and perfectly good tofu for 23,000 dong or less than 1.5 USD.

Enough about food and on the the disturbing part of the country. One evening I was walking around the beautiful Sword Lake (Hoan Kiem Lake) when a student in his early 20s came to talk to me. He told me he gets some food and study money by helping tourists find what they're looking for. Sounds nice, until you hear what they tend to look for. That's ladies, or even more disturbingly, boys. This was reaffirmed a few days later alongside another lake (there are tons of lovely lakes in Hanoi!) when a group of boys with ages ranging from 12 to 28 came to talk to me, speaking barely understandable English. One of the older ones was asking if I liked boys, and pointing to the younger ones in the group. Sheesh! I just don't know what would be the best way of helping these kids, just giving some money to the few you happen to meet doesn't really seem that much. Ideas welcome.

Overall Vietnam was a positive experience though, it's a beautiful country with very friendly people and plenty of historical sights, as well as good food. Next up, Shaolin and then Finland... Happy travelling to everyone! The pictures (a lot of them since they include photos taken by a colleague) are here.

Luckily enough I arrived in Beijing just in time to witness the first snowfall of the year the first morning here! Don't know how much of it there will be later either, it's a very dry climate, but it did bring a nice contrast to the summer weather (well, Finnish summer weather :-P) of Vietnam.