Living in Asia as a vegetarian 1

How to survive in south and far east asia as a vegan/vegetarian:

Japan:  Pretty tough. Fruits and veggies are crazy expensive, only affordable options are udon, katsu-udon but have to fish out some seafood from it, tempura, and foreign restaurants which cost at least twice as much as local ones. The only cheap supermarket is called “super tamade” where they sell lots of pre-cooked vegetarian options, and of course sushi, tempura, salads, at around 100 or 200 yen a tray. Hyaku-en, 100 yen shops are your best friends to find some salads, fruits, drinks, noodles and many other things. It’s pretty much same as a 7/11 but everything costs 100 yen. And as a last resource you can always throw away the inside thing of the onigiri and eat the rest.

Korea: Moderate. While eating out you have like 2 options, kimbab or bibimbab. While ordering kimbap make sure you say something like “ham bek chusaio” so they dont put ham on it. If you’re not vegan there’s always “Pizza school”, they are everywhere and you can get a huge pizza for 5.000 won. Street food is alright, there’s a fish-shaped pastry that has red beans inside and is pretty cheap, often you can find tempura and fried veggies. They have many chigae, which is like a stew or hot pot, sundobu chigae, or kimchi are good but you may have to take out some seafood from it.
Mr pizza could be the best value for money restaurant, they have salad buffet for 6.000 won, so all you can eat of salads, fruits, some cold noodles and other stuff.

China: Fairly easy. Fruits and veggies are dime a dozen and they are everywhere, options are plenty, rice and noodles with vegetables everywhere, beans, vegetable bbq at night. They use almost no dairy while cooking, so very easy for vegans.

Taiwan: Very easy. By far best vegetarian food in east Asia. Vegetarian restaurants everywhere, and most normal restaurants have at least a few vegetarian options. Great variety, affordable and extremely tasty. Even 7/11 are quite cheap and have fresh fruits and salads, noodles, vegetarian fried rice, vegetarian dumplings, fries, nuts, pastries, tofu and many other things.

Malaysia: Delicious Indian food, samosa, curries, roti, paratha, puri, chapati, many dosas, delicious Chinese vegetarian restaurants, delicious Malay food, some fried noodles, rice with veggies, lost of street food and fruits. From Penang, to Melaka, to Sabah, most dishes are delicious + juice bars + fruits everywhere.

Philippines: Probably worst food in SE Asia, there are some fruit markets and western food places, so it’s possible to kind of get by on a vegetarian diet.

Laos: Rice with veggies + fruits.

Singapore: Same as Malaysia, just more pricey.

Indonesia: Not as bad a Philippines, but local cuisine doesn’t have much to offer for vegetarians, there’s is gado gado and that’s pretty much it. You may find some Indian food in Bali if you’re lucky, but in Sumatra, Java or Borneo you’re going to eat your rice with veggies, every day + fruits 🙂

 

What’s your visa?

I met some North American friends the other day that are still quite new to Taiwan, and they couldn’t stop laughing when I told them Taiwanese people always ask me about my visa status.
Young and old people alike they are like really interested to know what visa foreigners have.

At the beginning, I didn’t understand why they were laughing, because after some years in Asia I just got used to people asking about that, in Japan, Korea and Taiwan people for some reason really need to know what your visa status is.

In south-east Asia they don’t seem to care about that though.

Maybe people here need to make sure you’re legally staying in the country or they want to see if you will stay a long time, or maybe it’s to check your social status, so they can judge you by how much money you have, as people without the working visa can’t work here, so they are automatically assigned a lower social status, either by being poor or by being forced by the system to work “illegally”. Because sadly we live in a country where is illegal for a human being to work. And even more sad is the fact that people here think that’s right, because the government says so, and everything the government says is right.

People with a student visa are somehow under the wing of a recognized government institution in the country, making them decent citizens, as they are part of the system that helps maintain the status quo. Unless they got the visa attending a language school or private institute, instead of an university. In that case, they are assigned the same social status as someone on a tourist visa.

People on a tourist visa, unless they are tourists, get placed in this underdog category, not yet a criminal but not someone they would like to hang out with either.

To conclude, in the eyes of Taiwanese, Korean, Japanese people they use the visa question with this simple formula to judge the foreigners:

Working visa = Good people
Student visa = Good people (unless it’s from a language school)
Tourist visa = Bad people

Coming back to the laughs though, first I didn’t get it, but then I saw how ridiculous it sounded because they sound like police when they ask you that. And because as a foreigner myself, if somebody comes to the country I live, It would never even cross my mind to ask them about their visa, but maybe also times have changed now and I’ve been a foreigner for too long, got used to that and started seeing it as normal, or just the way it is.

But when we meet someone from another culture they help us see things from a different perspective, and sometimes no words are needed, but a rapid honest laugh can make us understand how flawed our position really is.

Your government is bad and you should feel bad

Today I was sitting in the park enjoying a relaxing day when a guy comes and starts smoking his cigarette near me while blowing the smoke in my direction of course.

It’s not the first time, and it’s not because I’m in Asia. Of course in Asia, everything gets intensified because there are more people, but I’ve been having that problem pretty much all my life everywhere.

Same happens when I ride my bicycle every day, you get all the motorbikes and cars in front of you blowing you their toxic fumes, and even though I try to be health conscious and live a healthy life, I have to breathe waste, because yeah, people have to drive cars, right? And people have to smoke in the park, right?

So, I leave the park, start walking, and again thinking who’s fault is it that I have to breath toxic gases every day. Is it the guy who smokes or drives the car? No, because they don’t think for themselves, they are a no more than a product of their environment.

The guy would have probably been smoking a grasshopper, it had been properly advertised and introduced into his environment, as for the guy who was driving a fossil fuel powered car, he would be definitely driving a solar or electric car if it was readily and conveniently available to him.

Is it the people who had educated them or lead them to think that making the air dirty and causing cancer to others and to themselves was the right thing to do? Was the person who sold them the car or tobacco? Was the one who produced it and allowed for its promotion and distribution? Yes of course they were but only to some degree, as for most of them, they are, same as the final consumer, just a product of poorly designed, poorly managed system.

A system where if I feed the poor it’s good, but if I ask why the poor have no food and how can we change that, they will call me a communist, or an anarchist, or n extremist, or tell me I’m against the government, well, of course, I’m against the government and so should you.

So should you if you care about any other person besides yourself, or if you care about the animals or the environment. because your government knows it’s idiotic that the world still runs on fossil fuel while we have so many other clean energy sources, It’s not like we have one or two, we have more than 10, hydrogen, solar, tidal, wave, nuclear fusion, hydroelectric, wind, geothermal, radiant energy, biomass, etc. and your government knows it, yet they don’t implement them.

I remember once while hitchhiking in Finland some 5 years ago, got picked up by a driver who was driving a water powered car, he had been working on it for 20 years and showed me the whole mechanism and how it worked.

It was very strange for me as I had never seen anything like that, so I asked him, of course, why doesn’t he share it with the world, so he told me the story about how they took his friend that had helped him develop it, and how all the people who develop renewable energy powered cars seem to just mysteriously vanish from the face of the earth. He told me stories of some famous Russians and North Americans who had been taken together with their inventions.

Of course, I didn’t believe him, so when I got home I googled everything and it seemed he was right, everyone who tried to share it had disappeared.

Back to the park though, I keep walking and what do I see? The same thing i see every day, lots of office buildings, and construction sites (where they are always building new office buildings), the area is called Nangang. The city, Taipei.

Have you ever wanted to sit in an office for 10 hours a day? No? Me neither, but that seems to be the Taiwanese dream right now, a business related job. If you have that job you are considered to be a successful person here.

Basically, most of the times, sitting in front of a computer, sending a few emails, making a few phone calls and doing some paperwork, and that is, in fact, the idea that Taiwanese have of a successful person.

It’s just a trend of course, and it changes every decade, before it was engineering, before that it was medicine and in 10 years it will be something different.

These people say they like money and they do it for the money, yet most of the times they barely make enough to survive. They don’t really have much money but in their mind is all money money money.

Of course I tried to tell these people to ride a bicycle instead of car, to stop smoking, that money doesn’t make people happy and that success is measured by how we interact and thrive within our environment,  instead of being measured by how we trash things up or by how much time we spend in an office causing  some trouble to others.

And what do I get for that? They look at me like I’m a lunatic and belong in a mental asylum or like I come from mars and speak the tongue of my people. Others will say “you just don’t understand the real world” or “that’s how the world works”.

“That’s just how the world works” it is, after all, just a phrase assholes use to justify doing awful things,  but what to say to these people who think they live in the “real world”? Well, it’s my world too, I also live in the real world and I’m tired of you and your government polluting the air I breathe, the water I drink and poisoning the food I eat.

Air and water are like the very basic thing you should be trying to protect, if not for you at least for your descendants. Instead of that, you are a thrashing machine. As soon as you wake up you make sure during the day you can cause as much pain and trouble to me and to your environment as possible.

First in your car when you go to work making my air dirty, then at work creating some sort of bureaucracy or paperwork to make my life more difficult while making sure you contribute to the waste of resources and the destruction of my planet in as many ways as you can.

Well, you know what people from Nangang? I’m sick and tired of you, and your office buildings and your cars,  and your construction workers building more offices and your factories building more cars.

And even though nobody living in Nangang is reading this right now, and that person smoking in the park was probably not even aware he was polluting my air, this post will remain here, on the internet, as a silent protest from a person who always feels like he has no voice in this profoundly sick community.

One that, for the record, I feel very ashamed of belonging to.

The other face of religion

Spending some time in Taiwan has really changed my view on many many topics like society, politics, religion, etc

Religion here is some mixture of Taoism and Bushism with many gods and temples everywhere, and something like 90% of Taiwanese people believes in some kind of something.

I had the chance to visit many of this temples and seeing people’s faces while they pray usually makes me smile, not in a condescending way, but in a pure and humble one, like when seeing children playing, or cute puppies.

Usually, when they have some trouble in their life they will go to the temple, offer some food or money, light some incense, and say their prayers.

Now there’s nothing strange about that, most Asian countries do something similar, and I’d seen the same countless times in India, Thailand, etc. 

But the way they do it here is special.

There’s such a peace and serenity while they pray, so much devotion and happiness.

In my case, and I assume is the same for most westerners, when we hear the word religion we think terrorism, hate, war, pedophilia, corruption, brainwashing, censorship, racism, homophobia, massacres, bigotry, fanaticism, ignorance, etc.

But when I see people’s faces while praying here in Taiwan, or the monks cleaning and taking care of the temples, I think to myself: this is what religion should be about, well, kind of.

 

About taiwan

Friend: Hey! How’s life in Taiwan?

Bruno: Not bad, not bad at all, you know actually the main reason why I’ve always wanted to come here was that some of the best people I’ve met in my life were originally from here.

Friend: So people are nice there?

Bruno: As nice as they come

Friend: How about the weather?

Bruno: It’s extremely hot of course, but I can adapt.

Friend: I thought you hated the heat.

Bruno: Well, it’s just for a few months, I can manage.

Friend: You know I think I don’t even know where Taiwan is.

Bruno: It’s a tiny island south-east of China.

Friend: Is it part of China?

Bruno: Yes, of course, well..  no, not really, well, yes it is part of China, except that it isn’t.

Friend: What do you mean?

Bruno: It is part of China, except because they have their own language, their own culture, their own currency, their own government, chinese can’t come here without a visa.

Friend: It sounds like it’s not really part of China.

Bruno: Well, you know how politics work (they don’t) so if you ask a Chinese they will say Taiwan is part of China, if you ask a Taiwanese they will say it’s not, it’s a different country, and technically they are both right.

Friend: How is that possible?

Bruno: They made it in a way that it’s part of China and it’s also not part of China.

Friend: I’m getting confused now.

Bruno: Some countries accept it as a country some don’t, so it just depends on who you ask, add some corruption, a few government conspiracies there and you got Taiwan.

Friend: Fair enough, good to hear you like it there though.

Bruno: Yeah, it’s nice to be here.