I'm not vegan, if anything I'm an herbivore

For the past ten years or so I've eaten nothing but things that come from the earth: vegetables, grains, legumes, fruit. No meat, no fish. I also avoid eggs and dairy, although every now and then I find myself eating some in spite of myself.
So you're vegan, then? NO!
What do you mean? And here comes the usual, extremely pedantic (and wrong, I might add) classification, halfway between the bureaucratic and the anthropological: if you eat eggs and dairy you ARE vegetarian, if you don't eat those either you ARE vegan.
Like I said: NO!

First of all, a vegetarian diet shouldn't include eggs or dairy. And if you thought about it for a second, you'd see that right away. Do eggs grow on trees? No. Does milk gush out of plants? Nope. They're animal products. The root of the word "vegetarian" is "vegetable," so eggs and milk are NOT included. Real vegetarian eating is actually what people commonly (and wrongly) call vegan. And what people commonly call vegetarian is, in nutritionist jargon, called ovo-lacto-vegetarian. So NOT vegetarian.

Okay, fine, but let's get back to the point. Why can't you be called vegan if you eat like a vegan? For exactly the reason you just gave, buddy. Because I EAT LIKE a vegan, but I'm NOT a vegan.
What does that mean? What's the difference? Okay, first off, I'm no expert on the subject, but from what little I know, veganism is an activist movement that fights to defend animal rights. Rights that include the right not to be used for food. It's a group that lobbies at the political level, applies social pressure, practices evangelizing, and looks after its own marketing. It goes without saying that if you're fighting for the right of animals not to be exploited for food, you can't eat animal products.
Did you catch the subtlety? A vegan isn't vegan because they eat only plants; they eat only plants because they're vegan. If the difference (which is huge) isn't clear to you, I suggest you pick your high school logic textbooks back up.

Consequences of all this (my take on each in parentheses):
- A vegan might be salivating when they see a steak, but they still force themselves not to. (I often eat sitting at the table with omnivores, and their plates don't tempt me at all. If I felt like eating meat, I'd eat meat. I don't choose my menu out of principle but out of taste.)

- If it seems to you that vegans bust your balls, it's because they're committed, by choice, to social pressure and evangelizing. It's the social role they've assigned themselves. They bust your balls, yes, but they're consistent with their own principles. (Like I said, I often eat with people who order meat or fish and I don't bust anybody's balls. If anything, the exact opposite happens: there are people who break my balls. Besides, I sympathize with animal rights, but I understand that there are ancestral habits that can't be ignored.)

- The vegetarian diet (the real one, see above) is called vegan because vegans have proven to be very skilled at marketing. And the people who can't fucking stand vegans fell for the trick like suckers, ending up doing their advertising for them. (I didn't fall for it, and what I write is the proof. I also try to do my part in spreading the word, but, believe me, it's like emptying the ocean with a teaspoon.)

- Veganism is a fairly recent movement (mid-twentieth century) and a Western one (it was founded in the United Kingdom). Yet in the East, millions of people have eaten only plant products for millennia and never dreamed of calling themselves vegans. (I've favored plant foods ever since I was a kid. It's a personal trait of mine, one that sets me apart even from other members of my family. As an adult I went on to cut animal ingredients out of my diet completely, freeing myself from social conditioning and learning to listen to my body, after spending longer or shorter periods in environments devoted to vegetarianism, in the Far East itself. I've never had anything to do with modern veganism, with its activist vocation and Western stamp.)

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

Neo-slavery

I figured I wouldn't write anything about the slavery of delivery riders, because the solution is so obvious it hardly deserves much attention. But I decided to write about it precisely to get at why that solution never gets applied.

Let's start with the solution. The total cost of delivery has to include a bigger share for the rider than it does now. A much bigger one. And the person placing the order has to pay for it.
If you can't or don't want to cook for yourself and you prefer restaurant food, but you don't want to go to the restaurant, either to eat there or to pick up your meal in person, and you expect someone to bring it to your door, well, you have to pay for that service, because the person providing it is there to serve you, not to be your slave.
The restaurant owner can knock a little off the menu price, since you're not taking up space in the dining room and they don't have to wait on your table, but somebody still has to do the work of packing up and delivering your meal.
You pay for the rider, and right now that cost is too low. Even a moron can see that.

So why doesn't a problem this obvious get fixed?
Because the cause is all of us. The responsibility is spread so thin that it gets ignored, and in cases like this it's easy to look the other way. On top of that, the injured party is a weak minority, so the majority takes advantage of them shamelessly and gets away with it. Even though the sacrifice would be minimal in the end, they still decide not to make it. Even though, when the tables are turned, when it's our own paychecks at stake, we claim our rights and denounce abuses, real or not.

We're selfish and greedy, not out of malice but by nature. That's what politics and the law are for: to smooth out the natural flaws of the individual for the good of the community. 
Unfortunately, politics and the law don't always do their job well. And neither do we citizens. Unlike the riders, who, in spite of all that, always get screwed, no matter what.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

Pig

I don't approve of the menu, but the symbol is right. The only thing out of place in the city's "living room" is yet another tedious quarrel.
The thing is, people like eating pork thinking that "pig" is just a word, not the animal.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

The TV car - Bangkok, Thailand

The usual crowd sits in two rows:
football, curries and cheap beer
flood with good mood the atmosphere
and help all conversation flows.
A sudden force engulfs the scene
and in seconds every movement stops,
spoons are hanging in mid air,
all the faces turn as one.

Conflicting rights - Bangkok, Thailand

Seated on the tables barring the passage

Sometimes we have a lot to learn from the simplicity, the humanity and the flexibility of South East Asians (for an example you can take a look at the last picture below). Or better, to re-learn, as fifty or sixty years ago we were pretty much like them.
For some other aspects though it is better for us to go and take our lessons somewhere else. I realized that when I was having a bite and a beer at at table near the edge of a street in Bangkok. The restaurant management had placed their tables on the section of the sidewalk in front of the entrance. Normally people prefer to walk on the road - especially in this area and in the evening - turning it into a sort of pedestrian area. The road was jammed though, as it often happens here: a taxi, a tuk-tuk, a street stall and a few people ordering their food. The passersby were forced to move to the sidewalk. Notice that this is exactly the opposite of what should normally happen. This is a very common thing in Asia though, and it is not what I intend to point out here.

Police surcharge - Bangkok, Thailand

There is a little street in Bangkok, a few dozen meters from one of the most touristy roads of the country. In the past ten years I've heard its funny name - Rambuttri - mispronounced in several ways: Rainbow street, Rain on tree, and there was even a movie-version, Rambo 3. There is a place in that street that for the sake of anonymity - without keeping it too vague though - I'll just call SH. Back when it opened the SH used to be a guest house for low-budget tourists: two stories, a few rooms and a simple restaurant located near the main entrance. The owners are smart: they keep developing their place, which expands continuously over the years. A travel agency is added, the restaurant is open 24 hours and at night it becomes a bar with plenty of atmosphere, with soft lights and music that you can listen to in the coolest clubs of New York, Paris or Ibiza. The menu is divided into a Thai and an international section and the cocktail list is so long that an alcoholic could get bored just half-way through it. In the mid '00s they add a sort of a mezzanine floor, with pool tables and air-conditioning (the rest of the seats are outdoor). Later on the restaurant expands its boundaries and takes over the lower floor of a building two blocks away, next to a bank. A few more months and the gap is filled: the house that causes the solution of continuity is torn down and its place is taken by a large room decorated with Siamese and Balinese sculptures. As a last touch tables pop up along both sides of the alley, around a stall where a foreign guy prepares and serves shishas, water-pipes filled with flavored tobacco.

Endangered traditions - Moscow, Russia

Riumochnaya na Bolshoi Nikitskoi (in Russian Рюмочная на Большой Никитской, which means "Vodka glass on Nikitskaya Road") is one of the last, maybe the very last place of its type in Moscow. It looks like an old Italian osteria: a few squared tables scattered around a fairly small room, light curtains on the windows facing the sidewalk, a counter made of wood, like the bottle shelves and the panels that cover the walls. A messy toilet and a cubbyhole/storeroom. The supporters of sophisticated modernity at all costs can say what they want: I don't need much more than this to spend a couple of those hours which good memories are made of.

As soon as you enter you choose a table (after 6pm they might all be taken), then you go and get your orders directly at the counter, where you can find the courses of the day on display: meat, fish and vegetables, both cooked and row dishes. While the lady is heating your portions in the microwave you can order your drinks. The house specialty, of course, is vodka. You order it by the gram (yes, gram, neither bottle nor glass, nor with volumetric units of measure). 300 grams can fill a cruet and it's enough to make two people equipped with well armored livers feel the maggots crawling in their brains until bed time.

When everything is set up on our table we gulp down the first glassful, in one swallow. Then, in order to create the necessary sponge effect, we gobble up a delicious chicken breast topped up with sour cream, some lentils and a good portion of bread. 

"Between the first and the second glass nobody talks!" The Russian rule guarantees that the shortest possible time elapses between the first two sessions. C. and I are two incurable Italians though, and we are not able to undergo such an alcoholic-sect-ritual without indulging in a couple of comments before we drink our second glass, which we only half fill, just in case. This food is really tasty and we order a second round. 

Even some customers here - conforming to the style of the place - are very characteristic. The most picturesque ones are some unknown, semi-alcoholic artists. A poet whose verses have never seen a printing house hear us talking Italian and draws near. White hair and beard, already tipsy, with rudimentary English he indulges in typical bar pastimes that could work in Italy as well: jokes about Putin and Berlusconi and comments on unrestrained immigration, that in the case of Moscow is coming mostly from the former Caucasian and Eastern Soviet republics. When this lingua franca is not helping him he speaks Russian with C., who in turn translates what he says for me.

He leaves us for a moment, pinches the can of Sprite of a man who's reading a paper a few meters away and takes it to his own table. The other guy - a younger version of our friend, with still black hair and beard - fumes and complains a little at first but finally stands up and joins him. The newcomer speaks much better English and introduces himself as an artist too, without specifying his field.

After another hour of jokes, comments, talking, translations, snacks and vodka we stand up, we say bye like respectable drunkards do - with energetic hugs, awkward handshakes, foul breath and sentimental sentences - and then with a staggering walk we go out of the place, where we enjoy the pinch of the October cold on our spirit-inflamed cheeks.

A piece of tradition that holds out in the very heart of Moscow, right in front of the conservatory. Like the popular banyas - centers with saunas and steam baths, consisting of huge, badly lighted and worse furnished rooms, simple equipments and dingy structures, where groups of friends or colleagues spend a few hours talking and relaxing, while sweating near the oven, shivering in the freezing pool, flogging themselves with birch and oak twigs or sipping tea and eating snacks in the refreshment area - hold out amid the new luxurious wellness centers.

It would have taken very little to be still able to enjoy such an evening in Italy as well: we could have avoided to replace at least one quarter of our old osterie with trendy pizzerie or - even worse - pretentious wine bars. But in most of the cities that I know of, ruining is a service provided in full, and that little conservation effort was not made. The old simple wine list (1. red, 2. white, 3. prosecco, all of them strictly "of the house") was replaced by a sequence of names that I hardly understand and that, unlike a lot of people, I don't enjoy pretending to know. Bottles with wonderful labels of high-sounding origin that have absolutely nothing to do with the local territory and culture, sold by the glass (beautifully made crystal goblets that many hold by the stem with recently developed presumptuousness, swollen like barrels but thriftily served only one-third filled) at the price of a full bottle of the good old poison.

Times change, traditions die. A good nostalgic as I am, I enjoy looking for them elsewhere.

At the alcoholics'/3 - Bangkok, Thailand

Foto di Olgierd Pstrykotwórca

The whole series "At the alcoholics" is dedicated to Jack London, author of "John Barleycorn".

Continued from here.

The following scenes happened on different days and are reported here in random order.

S. keeps on depriving us of the pitiful shows that we had got accustomed to and only orders soft drinks and fruit juices. It must be the advice that the doctor gave him after diagnosing cirrhosis.

One of the few saloon-like characters who don't drink alcohol here is a fat man with a red nose, dull eyes and boozer gait, who orders his bottles of Coke and Fanta with whispers, as if it was an illegal or outrageous act. Which, in a place like this and with a face like his, come to think about it, could also make sense.

Finally, after almost a week spent drinking sweet stuff for kids, S. threw off the mask and resumed his close conversations (sometimes even literally) with his best friend: an American gentleman with dark complexion, a black suit with white embroidery, a cascade of crystal jewels, a small tight hat and spiced fragrances: Mr. Jack Daniels.

We hear a heavy thud, S. is gone. We stand up and search for him. He collapsed, he's lying under the table now, the chair next to him, upside down. Someone asks him to stand up, he is probably trying hard in his mind, but his body doesn't budge. He is not injured: he's just wasted. They help him to his feet but it's not an easy task: it seems that they are hauling a trailer truck out of a river bed by use of powerful windlasses. When he sits in his chair he's got bubble-like eyes, a blank stare, lost in the whirl of lights and shapes that he can see in front of him, and his hands shaking on the plastic table.

When he returns to the globe of distorted reality that is surrounding him he tries to stand up, then walks like a baby gorilla toward the center of the street, does a 360 degree turnaround, sways, brushes against a taxi that stopped in order not to run him over and continues to stagger until a tourist helps him to get back to his seat. A few minutes later he will go through the same procedure all over again.

The constantly drunk woman is sitting at a table, she dozes off, wakes up, mutters, yells at some person unknown even though nobody pays attention to her, then she continues to move her lips without uttering any sound, for various minutes. Finally, defeated and exhausted, she gets back to snore.

Continued...

At the alcoholics'/2 - Bangkok, Thailand

Photo by Adam Foster (CC)

The whole series "At the alcoholics" is dedicated to Jack London, author of "John Barleycorn".

Continued from here.

The following scenes happened on different days and are reported here in random order.

There is a group of Spaniards sitting at a table. They don't seem to be alcoholics but they fall in with the atmosphere of the place by ordering one bottle of beer after another since the early afternoon.

Apparently they have just met here and they decide to take a picture to remember the event. They ask the constantly drunk lady to take the photo. Unfortunately it will be a bad surprise, for them of course, not for me or anybody else who has already been here. She grabs the camera and for the Spaniards this will be the last good piece of news they receive. She looks at it as if it was a pulsing fragment of a mysterious asteroid. A gray veil, a confused expression descends on the faces of the tourists, who try to dispel their embarrassment offering random advice. "That button over there!" "This angle!" "That background!" Finally she gets out of her trance and decides to give it a try. After numerous attempts, failed amid awkward maneuvers and swaying, she is ready to click. It's raining as usual and the umbrella that shelters the table has a hole through which a thick and continuous cylinder of water is falling, right in front of the camera. She doesn't see it, as she doesn't see any other detail that is not included in the set of the movie that she is watching in her mind. The Spaniards are gesticulating frantically, suggesting her to move a little to the side, pointing at the water. She misunderstands, thinking that there is something wrong with the camera, then looks at it from all sides, extremely puzzled, as if she couldn't remember how the hell it ended up there, wasting all the work that she has done so far. Fortunately a sober - well, almost - colleague of her arrives, takes the camera from her hands and in a matter of thirty seconds the picture is taken. The positive side of this permanent state of drunkenness is that it spares the subject humiliations and rancor: when the flash goes off, in fact, she has already crouched down on her chair, oblivious of everything.

The same table where the Spaniards were sitting is normally used as a meeting point by the most picturesque clients of the bar: a rabble of western drunkards who wouldn't have done badly in the most sordid saloons of the Old West. In the early afternoon the table is already full of empty bottles of whiskey and beer, and a few hours later the most pathetic and unforgettable shows are staged.

One of them is S., a North European who has been hanging around here for about ten years. S. has just got back to Bangkok, bringing with him a bag full of clothes and other presents. He's welcome with giggles, yells and greetings. The sincere and disinterested version of local enthusiasms (there are also some more or less devious ones). He repays the courtesies with fantastic, totally toothless smiles. When he has finished to hand out his gifts he sits down and orders a Schweppes. A Schweppes! This is surprising news for those who have seen some of his performances with bottle and glass, and we'll have a chance to talk about those ones as well. Probably he has just got out of the plane and he doesn't feel quite well: I cannot find any other explanation for such an unusual behavior. 

A foreigner with a tattoo as big as his back stands up from his chair, only with his body though, as his soul doesn't seem to be willing to follow him. He stands still on the spot, swaying, then gets hold of the back of a plastic chair that dangerously bends under his weight. When he manages to move he leans against the body of a friend, slightly less drunk than him. He stays like that, clinging to him, for a few minutes, apparently unconscious, then he recovers, wholeheartedly hugs his friend and finally kisses him. They finally leave, connected like Siamese brothers (as in the medical-scientific meaning of the expression, not as in "Thais", i.e. from here).

Continued

The gesture - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

There is a gesture we make in Italy, with the fingers of one hand pointed upwards, fingertips joined. It can express different things: doubt, confusion, disbilief, disagreement and sometimes even mockery. I found out by chance that in the Arab world they use the same gesture, with a completely different meaning though.
The first time I noticed it I was in Kuala Lumpur, sitting at a Lebanese restaurant, with some Saudi students of mine. While the Egyptian waiter was serving our courses, two of the guests asked him something at the same time. He looked at them while he kept arranging the dishes on the table and then, after saying nothing, as soon as one of his hands was free, he turned towards each one of them making that gesture. I was surprised, I thought it was quite shamefaced of him to use with his clients a sign that might well mean: "What the hell do you want?" I expressed my doubts to my students and they explained to me that in the Middle East they use it to ask somebody to wait a moment, and it is a rather polite expression.
A few days ago, still in Kuala Lumpur, I was standing on a sidewalk, watching people swarming around the bars and clubs of the city center. A Chinese old lady was walking by, begging with a cup. An Arab man stopped her and showed the hand-sign to her face, then he turned towards a friend and asked him some cash. Finally he went back to the lady and put an enormous tip into her cup. He obviously wanted to tell her: "Wait a moment little old lady, you won't regret that". Not as they would have thought in Italy: "Hey you, cranky old witch, what are you doing? Get the hell out of here!"

The solitary traveler's nightmare/2 - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

"Nightmare", by brentbat (CC)

Continued from here

The nightmare materialized again in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at an open-air restaurant. Two minutes after having ordered a soup and a fruit juice a doubt got hold of me, I put a hand into my pocket with that usual scared-cat-jump of mine, I didn't take out money but my cellphone instead and while I was pretending to read an urgent message I called the waiter and canceled my order.

Once I was outside, shame and sense of guilt suddenly fell on me, like a monsoon rain. How can it be - I kept saying to myself - such bad manners. Leaving like that, after having ordered. And how I did it...with that ridiculous coupe de theatre.

Half an hour later I was already back, my pockets full of Ringgit. I apologized and ordered again.

"Did you actually make some of the things that I ordered earlier?"

"Well, your juice, but don't worry about that..."

At the end I asked to be charged for the fruit juice as well and I left a good tip.

They knew me at that restaurant, I could have explained the situation, stay, eat and later on come back and pay. I could have but I wouldn't have been able to, because embarrassment, paranoia and ancestral complexes are often more difficult to face than those rebels in the desert. Well, perhaps not the rebels, but the kids in the dark alley, maybe...

The solitary traveler's nightmare/1 - Tokyo, Japan

The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781

What is the most common nightmare of a person who travels alone, far from home, in an unknown place, where people speak another language and think in a different way, a country with alien customs, traditions, values and laws? Is it being assaulted in a filthy and dark alley by a gang of kids, high on crack, with bulging and wet eyes, empty bellies, holding shiny blades in their hands? Or that someone slips two hundred grams of heroin into your bag, a few meters away from the customs, in a country where drug dealing is punished with death penalty? Or perhaps it is boarding a flight of a secondary carrier in a developing country and starting to notice creaking, squeaking, vibrations, failures and draughts when the hatches have already been locked? Or will it be running into a group of armed rebels in a desert area, a hundred kilometers away from the nearest town?

Not for me. Not that I am what you would call an intrepid globetrotter but this kind of misfortunes - maybe because I haven't personally experienced any of them - seem quite unlikely to happen to me.

The nightmare that can cover my forehead with beads of cold sweat, my inexhaustible source of panic, the only reason why I might not want to hang around alone or out of my customary routes, what really frightens me most is the thought of being in a restaurant and after having ordered my dinner - just when I'm about to relax, looking forward to tasting one of my favorite dishes - realizing that I don't have even a cent with me.

It happened to me twice. The first time in Japan, in the outskirts of Tokyo, fortunately not far from where I was staying. That time I managed to finish a whole bowl of beef and rice before putting a hand in my pocket only to fish out the hope to possess a bundle of Yens. As it's often the case in Japan, the cook/waiter/cashier who was standing behind the counter at which I was sitting couldn't speak a word in English: he was just looking at me with a baffled expression while he kept chopping his vegetables with a large knife. I rummaged through my bag and I thanked my good luck when I found my passport inside. I handed it to him and with theatrical and slow gestures I tried to explain that I would be back in no time. 

I got home without breathing, I grabbed all the money I could find and I rolled down the stairs. When I entered the restaurant I was purple-faced, soaked with sweat and on the verge of dying of asphyxia, holding a tangled mass of Yens as if it was a relay baton. After I paid, the cook, with the impassible expression of a Kabuki mask, laid down the machete, took my passport from under the table and gave it back to me.

I gave him my passport, I kept thinking while I was walking. My passport...well, in Japan you can trust them, here at least. But then I was at that again: I gave him my passport, my passport...well, if you don't trust somebody even in Japan, then...how could I do that, my passport...

Continued on another post...