Vegetarianism In China

I found this online and instead of para-phrasing just thought i would post the whole thing. I wanted to post it in regards to all my friends and family that think eating lesser meat and more vegetables is easy to do here in China. I thought this blog entry rang very true for my experiences. Enjoy.

It's Hard Out Here Being a Vegetarian
"As locals are quick to point out, life is tough in China for a vegetarian. Most of the best dishes are made with meat, and vegetables are often used only to compliment the main attractions. Announcing that you do not eat meat is usually met with a combination of disbelief and pity.
A life without meat is a sad life indeed to most Chinese. In a country where famine and mismanagement of agriculture are bitter memories for most middle-age people, it is hard to fathom why someone would voluntarily give up a luxury that is finally so plentiful. Aside from that, many Chinese equate eating a strong appetite for meat with a healthy sex drive. Over the years more than one man here has made a point of making it clear that even if I don’t eat meat he surely does, winking and nudging his friends on the assumption that I fail to grasp the underlying implication.
Explaining to people why I don’t eat meat is not an easy thing, but it is much more difficult in China. Each answer begs another question, usually leading us down a path that ends up with a diagnosis that I am either nuts or silly. In the beginning I used to say vegetarianism was “my personal philosophy”, which was probably the most useless rationale I could have given. Later I changed it to “It is a little like Buddhism”. This was somewhat more helpful, although people frequently tell me either that most Buddhists now eat meat, or the cheekier types like to debate over whether eggs are in fact animals.
When I was living in Sichuan I did not eat fish at all, which at least gave me some cover from hypocrisy, although it led to terrible confusion. Wait staff would insist that there was no meat in a dish and it would arrive with seafood in it. That did not bother me so much because it seemed like a logical mistake. Now that I eat fish I am stuck in the same quandary of trying to tell people that I am a pseudo-vegetarian. However not all mixed up make sense to me.
The one that always baffled me was when people brought me “meat-free” dishes that were chock full ‘o ham. After a while it occurred to me that the problem was not one of stubbornness, but rather linguistics. In Chinese ham is huotui (火腿) or roughly “smoked leg”. It is missing the key character for meat rou (肉) that is used for beef, pork, and chicken. The dishes were not rou, but tui? And leg is not meat.
Finally, there are two other tricks of logic that people try to pull on me from time to time. The first is bringing primarily vegetable dishes with generous bits of meat. In their eyes the dishes were vegetable dishes, which was indistinguishable from vegetarian. The second, and my personal favorite, was that no matter how clear I made it that I did not want even a little bit of meat, sometimes a dish would come that was mostly animal.
The answer that I would get when I asked about it? “It tastes better that way.”"


Welcome to the Real China.

Rigging In China

So i thought i would do a short post out there for all my rigging friends in theatre. It seems that securing/rigging things over here in China are just a little bit different. As we loaded out of Harbin, half the the locals decided to take down there own scenery which included a lot of hung set pieces. When they came in, i just had to take some pictures of how they were rigged up. All of this would def. be declared unsafe in the states.

And further more as we were packing up our sea containers (which is how our gear travels from venue to venue) we noticed how they were securing the containers to travel about 1200 miles!!! With bailing wire!!! The wire was no thicker than that of a coat hanger, and here they are trying to secure 100 tons of equipment with it. If you aren't scared yet, you should be!!!

Last but not least (and having nothing to do with rigging) here is a picture of the stage floor in Harbin. This was the part of the floor we had to roll one of our set pieces on and off our show deck into the show. The scraps on the floor are about 2 feet wide and a foot long. They are no deeper than a pen point and what did the theatre manager do? We got a bill for $5000.00 US dollars!!!!

Lets marinate on that for a minute. The Yuan in China is worth almost 1/7 the amount of the US dollar. And how did they come to this figure. They said the floor was originally built for a million dollars. And we scratched up .002 percent of the floor. NOW, that is retarded.

White is In

I have been very interested lately at all the women walking around with umbrella's and parasols. I understand the point in carrying around one when the weather is hot and to avoid the sun for long period's of time, but I started to notice them everywhere, especially on our last trip to ironically "Sun Island".




So i decided to ask Jake's fiance April (who is born and raised in mainland China) why they are so popular. First off she told me that they are protecting themselves against skin cancer. And I told her that you probably won't get skin cancer if you are spending less than an hour in the sun a day. She seemed confused and said "really". And i said i was pretty sure.




However, she also told me that Chinese women are very careful not to spend any time in the sun. Many of them desire to be as white as possible. I also noticed that men really don't care about the sun, most go around without shirts in the summer. As for women, she said that they want to stay as white as possible and some even go through bleaching processes to make them whiter.



Who knew. as for the western world it seems most people aim to be darker and tan as often as possible. But not in China.

PS. This women grabbed me and had to have my picture taken with her. Told ya, I am an outright celebrity. Or maybe i am just fat!

Siberian Tiger Video's

Below in the first video is the flying chicken we bought for 20 dollars.

Below, in the 2nd video is the duck bought for $8 dollars. There is a good bit of build up to this one and you see quite a bit of the tigers playing on the side, before they throw the duck in. Listen to the tigers, right after the duck is caught, and you will hear how loud the tigers roar to fend off other tigers after they have caught there prey.

Below, video 3, you will see a chicken tied onto a stick and fed to a tiger. It is held up in a tree and literally within a second the tiger climbs about 10 feet up the tree and grabs the chicken.

Siberian Tiger Preserve

Heading out of Harbin.

A really cool bush sculpture.

On Friday since we didn't have to be at the theatre till 5pm, we planed a trip to the Harbin Siberian Tiger Preserve. We were all very excited to go and experience a natural habitat for these tigers.

As a preface to this, had I have known that the preserve was actually kinda like a zoo i might not have gone. I don't like zoo's in the states! None the less, there was a good bit of grounds that the tigers could roam. However, the cages that were on the grounds were quite small. (Even though we only saw about 10 tigers in those cages.)

So we all boarded onto a bus at 9am and headed off to the preserve. On our arrival we boarded into a medium size bus and headed out into the gated off areas of the preserve. At first the driver made us keep the sliding windows closed, and with no air conditioning we all started to rebel. Lets think about this. You are driving through an area filled with tigers and they tell you to close the glass windows. Does anyone see a problem here? Hmm, false security maybe? So within 5 Min's we had opened up the windows and spitting distance from the tigers.

I cannot even begin to tell you the fear that ensues when you are 3-10 feet away from these animals. They are amazing and deserve alot of respect. Even at 10 feet away, when a tiger "purrrrs" you feel it deep in your body. It is an intense feeling. Below, this guy was NOT happy to see us.

We drove thru gate after gate... through young adults, to breeding adults, to mature adults, into the liger zone. And PAUSE.

LIGERS EXIST!!!!!!!!! Ligers. 1 lion + 1 tiger= liger . I had NO freakin' idea!!!

End pause. So we traveled all over the grounds looking for tigers, and it was very amazing. What wasn't amazing was that our wonderful driver had ZERO respect for the tigers. He drove like a bat out of hell. We were in caravan with another bus, and the entire time the 2 drivers honked there horn at each other to either speed up or get out of the others way. I mean it was just silly. You would think they would have had some consideration for the tiger's surroundings.

At any case, it was amazing. After our driving trip through the grounds, they had a huge caged walking structure that you could walk over another tiger area. And the highlight of this part, was that you could feed a live cow($150), goat($60), chicken($8), duck($8), or flying duck($20) to the tigers. (If you go on You Tube and enter "Siberian Tiger Feeding" you can see the goat)

Now i know what you are thinking and no we did not feed a cow or goat to the tigers. I do have to say that it felt very primeval and gladiator-Esq. Believe me, there were many of thoughts raised regarding this matter. (In this photo, i was inch's away from this tigers paws.)

1. The animal has to eat, and technically it is survive of the fittest and the tiger is at the top of the food chain.

2. It is a zoo, so this animal could easily be eating grain products.

3. Zoo's around the world will feed live animals to help keep animals like tigers in top condition and use to hunting in the wild (IE. if they are ever released back into the wild).

4. What about the duck, the duck has the right to live to.

5. The least they could do is serve dead animals to the tigers, thus eliminating the torture of the duck.

6. Our token vegetarian wanted to thus throw one of us "horrible meat eating humans" in and see what happens.

And on and on and on.

Alas, we chose to buy 1 chicken and 2 ducks to feed to the tigers. Cause after all, it made for some good photography. I WILL UPLOAD THE 3 Video's IN MY NEXT BLOG, SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO WATCH THEM. They really aren't that bad. (Below- I think i love this photo the best. These 2 tigers played with each other for almost 20 Min's while we were there watching. Just so cool to see in person.)

To conclude our trip to the preserve, we then were able to take pictures with a baby Siberian Tiger. (Cost was about 6 bucks)

And that was my day at the Tiger park.

1st Video!

ALRIGHT, now i am excited!!! I have just uploaded my first video. It is a little long but give you a pretty good idea of what a typical cab ride is like. We are traveling at night back to our hotel and it is about 15 mins. Enjoy and i promise my next video will be more exciting.

McDonald's

Just a quick picture blog of Mc D's. I wanted to put up a few photo's of what it looks like. I took a photo so you can see it looks exactly what it does in the states. As expressed, the only difference is that they have disgusting chicken nugget sauces which is why i brought my own from the states and they serve corn!!! Corn!I think the kid on the slide is adorable. The first kid i tried to take a picture of started crying and refused to come down the slide. His mom had to come get him. (Sorry kid)

PS. I hate McDonald's in the states!!! It is kinda bearable here.