Beijing weekend

Kind of depressing to arrive in Shanghai to witness the brown murky waters and the gray skies. It was mostly natural though, a rainy day, but still. Cold too. Anyway, Shanghai has its share of nice restaurants and I was looking forward to a feast until I eventually got queued all the way to the ticket counter at the railway station and found out they wouldn't have tickets for the faster evening trains but only for one leaving in the afternoon, and what's worse, a hard seat for that! Stupidly, I took that ticket then.

Now here's my information piece on train travel in Asia.

1. Use the train rather than bus if possible in countries other than Malaysia, South Korea, and possibly Japan. In Japan it's pretty much the same but the bus is cheaper.
2. Never ever take a hard seat for a journey of over 3 hours in China! If that is all that's available, forget point 1 and take the bus.

Anyway, I rushed to the vegetarian restaurant whose location I was most certain about, the one on Nanjing road, and ate quickly. The food was really good though. Then back to the railway station and to endure 17 hours on a full train, on a hard seat, with lights on all night and no hope of sleep, to be filled with anxiety of actually getting the tickets onwards to Hanoi and to get to work within some reasonable hour. So what to do? Study Vietnamese of course. :-)

The train arrived around noon and Beijing railway station unsurprisingly doesn't sell tickets to Vietnam. They suggested the west railway station, but I didn't have time to go there, heading to work instead. Afterwards it was on to a new vegan club event, Fridays at the Vegan Hut. Great to see the folks again and of course the Vegan Hut food is excellent. Then I just went to the office for the night -- being happily homeless, after all. Saturday morning and "rushing" to the agency that supposedly sells tickets to Hanoi, almost certain in my mind that they wouldn't have any at such short notice. Rushing through Beijing is kind of funny, especially if you do it in public transport. It just takes hours and hours. I got there at lunchtime and to my utter surprise, they did have tickets! Brilliant, on my way to Vietnam! :D

For lunch I had to go to the new vegan restaurant north from Xizhimen since a Chinese author was to interview me for a vegan book. Don't really know what the book will be like, but the interview went nicely, she asked me all sorts of usual stuff like why did I go vegan etc and even more odd stuff like what's my view on life. Quite interesting actually. And the food was amazing, and so great to see more friends there as well.

Later at night it would be a friend's birthday, so I ordered a birthday cake from the vegetarian shop, verifying once again that it really is vegan. Those just look so fancyful I always have my doubts. Anyway, they made the cake in time and I went to a third of my selection of four great restaurants for the weekend. That was 我行我素, because I happen to really like their "meat" pies and the "west lake vinegar fish". I got plenty of the "meat" pies to go too. But the birthday party didn't really happen in a large degree, went to a bar with a couple of friends and had the cake at her place.

Next day and rushing to the office to pick up my stuff, lunch with the vegan family and their super cute vegan baby, and on to the train to Vietnam! The ride took two days and was pretty much ok. The train goes nonstop until Nanning, there everyone is ordered out of the train for half an hour to a nice waiting room, then taken back to the same train, so it's ok to leave the luggage there. At the border town of Dongdang on the Vietnamese side there are the formalities, in a confusing manner and for some reason in the middle of the night, but it works somehow. And then another Vietnamese train takes you the rest of the way to Hanoi. It's not quite as nice as the Chinese train but not too bad either.

A month in Beijing

Running behind on the blog as usual... so as a quick wrap-up, there was a month in Beijing, and the company arranged me this huge luxury apartment to live in. Never lived in such a thing before and it doesn't feel comfortable, especially not in a country with as much poverty as China. Plus it does get lonely in a huge place, listening to the echo of your own footsteps. So I filled up the place with couchsurfers. And cats, four of them at best, former stray cats for temporary housing. And weekly milongas. Here's some pics.



Then a few restaurants that need mention:
1) The Vegan Hut -- a great vegan restaurant in Jianwai SOHO, right off the Guomao metro station. Probably the only place in China with vegan ice-cream. Excellent stuff. They're open also for breakfasts during the week. And have wireless internet. There's a take-away stand downstairs, the restaurant itself is on the 2nd floor (or 1st floor counting the British way). The Vietnamese dishes are particularly good. They also don't add MSG, although it might exist in premade sauces.
2) The other side of love, another vegan place with a more extensive menu, and less fake meats than most Chinese vegetarian restaurants. It's north from Xizhimen, at Mingguangcun west stop of bus line 16 from Xizhimen. In Chinese: 彼岸爱心素，艺海大厦，明光村西站。

And to the end, the first cake I've ever baked, at least if I'm not forgetting anything... it was pretty tasty, just should've had something nice for a topping.

Farewells

Unfortunately the last few weeks in Beijing were too busy for blogs, and unfortunately I haven't been taking many photos either to enable writing later on. Well, what went on was the longest series of farewells in history. (In my history, that is, I'm sure you can find someone being farewelled for 34 years, 5 months and 6 days if you check the Guinness book of records.) So this is dedicated to the amazing vegan community in Beijing, their great hospitality and amazing cooking and baking skills! Thank you all, you're so lovely! :-)

Oh, I do have a few photos, some of Laura's creations:


So, stuffed enough to decide to turn fruitarian, I finally left Beijing. Unfortunately donating all my material possessions didn't come through in quite that level, I have a closet-full of stuff in the office, including all these books. These are pretty much all dictionaries and course books of the languages I want to learn, so how could I give them up? In any case, after more than 3 years it was high time to say goodbye to the smoggy city, funnily enough right at the time when it's due to become non-smoggy for a couple of weeks due to the stupid Olympics that everyone hates. Well, maybe not everyone hates them, but it's hard not to having lived in Beijing recently.

Right now I'm writing this in Xi'an, the ancient capital famous for the terracotta warriors, but I'll only go see them tomorrow and the drum and bell towers didn't seem too extraordinary. Maybe I'm just tired of China right now, they are pretty nice. So I'll just post pictures rather than judgements without any basis. Or at least one picture of a huge drum. They used to beat the drums at night and the bells during the day, so people who were too lazy to wear their digital watches or look at the sun could tell the passage of time.

I also saw this interesting cross-walk. Yes, it is a circle, or a roundabout if you will, over the streets. I kind of like it. Nice green colour too. And I must mention the housing thing too! I booked a hostel room online, but arriving in the hostel they said the room isn't ready. So I took a long walk. Coming back in the afternoon they told me they would have to put me in a hotel instead because the previous folks didn't leave. So I got a nice standard hotel room instead for the price of the hostel. Lucky me, eh?

There also seems to be many more beggars in Xi'an than Beijing. It may be partly that they've been moved out of Beijing for the thing that "everyone" hates, but even a few years ago I don't think they were that many. Well, everyone, help and love each other!

June in China

Right, so I didn't write anything during the whole month of June. I was working mostly, but there have been other things, let me just wrap things up quickly and put up some pictures. This was a month spent completely in China. The first thing I would note when getting off the plane was the smog of course, it hangs over the city of Beijing almost constantly. Very depressing.

There was a brief escape from that though as I took a trip to Chengde with some friends for a weekend. Chengde is a city about 250 km away from Beijing, built largely as an imperial recreation place. There's a large amount of temples, especially of the Lama Buddhist style, and an imperial palace and large grounds with all sorts of "beauty spots", mainly pavilions or houses in great scenery, built during the Qing dynasty (1644 - 1911). There's a couple of interesting-looking rocks too, and nice hiking in the mountains. I don't think there are any vegetarian restaurants, but you can get veggies from the regular restaurants as usual in China.






You get to Chengde from Beijing by various buses or a train. The buses leave from Sihui long distance bus station, or there might be buses from elsewhere too but at least from there. The ticket price is from Y50 up. The slow and crowded train that runs once a day during the night is only Y20.

In Beijing it's been a working and exercising mainly, and of course vegan club meetings. There have been a couple of team building events from work, going hiking to waterfalls and boating around. Some pics from those then:




Oh, and also a new vegan restaurant has now been opened in town, the Vegan Hut, but I'll write a proper review of that later. Finally, I have talked to the bosses and have got my distance work idea approved, so I shall be leaving Beijing soon. First, though, I'll be spending a couple of weeks in Shaanxi countryside, then returning to Beijing briefly although I won't have an apartment here anymore, and then off somewhere else. Haven't decided where to yet. Exciting, isn't it? :-)

“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. :-)

Dancing to a new vegetarian restaurant

Last night I visited a rather new vegetarian restaurant that wasn't in the list when I wrote my review of vegetarian Beijing earlier. It's another one of the Lily vegetarian restaurant (百合素餐厅) chain, this one located in a traditional hutong house near the crossroads of Dongzhimenneidajie (东直门内大街) and Dongzhimenneibeixiaojie (东直门内北小街), south from Xiaojie bridge (小街桥) or west from Dongzhimen metro station. The fact that it is built in a hutong and retains the traditional hutong feel about it makes this place more interesting especially to travellers, and indeed it seemed many foreigners had found their way there. The menus were bilingual in Chinese and English and included some pictures of the foods. The menu seemed largely the same as the other Lily restaurants, which means a lot of mock meat and especially mock fish dishes. I tried the "lychee flavoured vegetarian fish", "curry vegetarian chicken with potato" and "mushroom hotpot with vegetarian satay", and some dumplings to go with it. The portions were quite large, and the food wasn't bad, but I wasn't really impressed with them either. Therefore I give the restaurants three smiley faces in my very own restaurant criteria as seen in the earlier review. Prices were similar to the other places in relatively central Beijing.

Otherwise, I've been biding my time dancing tango as we have a teacher visiting from Germany, the dance is great, much recommended to everyone. It's very creative, communicative, beautiful, and most of all, fun! I'm also just starting up salsa now, must keep dancing as the temperatures go low!

Contact details for the above mentioned Lily vegetarian / 百合素餐厅(香草园店):
东城区东直门内北小街香草园胡同23号(四合院内), 64052082.
From Dongzhimen metro station, take exit A to Dongshimennei and turn around as the exit faces north and you should head to the road going west. Then head straight on along Dongzhimenneidajie until you reach Dongzhimenneibeixiaojie. Cross that street and walk north, the Xiangcaoyuan hutong is the first or second little street on the left. The road sign is quite small so be on the lookout.

Blood donation in China

The blood donation tends to be very similar around the world, as far as I know, but there are certain differences also. In China they're only now moving to the completely voluntary donations, certainly a good move as the paid "donations" led to individuals over-donating and disease-spreading etc. At least Beijing seems to be in voluntary donations now, the countryside is probably behind in matters.

The confusing part for me at least was that there aren't dedicated places for blood donation, but this is done in so called "blood buses" that are parked around the city, and then one would have to figure out where are they and when. But I gather they are in the same places pretty much every day, from 10 AM to 6 PM, more or less. Other than that, the donation proceeds in much the same way as elsewhere (well, my experiences are from Finland and the UK). First there's a form to fill (in Chinese) with the regular questions about illnesses and sexual behaviour and so on. Then they take a blood sample, presumably to measure the hemoglobin and whatever other tests they might do, I didn't ask what they did with it. They do use new needles, thankfully. And then it's the donating part which is the same as anywhere really, although you don't lie down in the buses but it's done while sitting. They gave me a T-shirt for thanks, those are really cheap over here.

Beijing Raptor Rescue Centre

I finally found the time to visit the Beijing Raptor Rescue Centre this weekend. This centre was established in 2001 by IFAW and Beijing Normal University (BNU) on BNU grounds. It provides rehabilitation and medical treatment for raptors that are e.g. hurt when flying into kite strings or glass buildings, or kept illegally as pets. The centre holds the birds for a maximum of three months, trying to heal them with the target of releasing them into the mountains. This target has been reached for hundreds of birds, but unfortunately about 1/3 of them cannot be rehabilitated and are euthanised instead. They also educate people on raptor conservation.

The centre has had many international visitors and is endorsed by organizations such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Several of the people working there are vegetarian, which is very much a rarity in China. The raptors, obviously, are not. They're fed with chicken and mice. Their cages weren't terribly large, but probably bearable for short time keeping, especially for the smaller birds. They had also artificial rain in parts of the cages and tried to keep human contact to a minimum so the birds would live more naturally. Detailed health logs are kept on each bird.

In any case, it was very interesting and very positive to see a wildlife rescue centre in China, there are very few and from the lack of wildlife, they would be very much in need. At the moment the centre had 20 gorgeous birds, hopefully they can all be released soon.