Polska!

Monday 26th March 2012 we arrived in Wroclaw, Poland. Friday 30th March 2012 we will move into our new home together.

Colin and I got drunk on the hostel floor last night and we talked deeply (well as deep as you can after consuming several beers and long islands...yum) we talked about love, trust, marriage, and the past, my blackberry (mmhmm), his life, my life. It was really beautiful actually.

Sometimes truly tender moments arise from being completely trashed.

I am very happy that we have decided to move to Europe together and try to carve out a life here, it’s exciting having a clueless future in a country that has continual festivals, activities, a bustling market square, beautiful architecture, and food and drink at giveaway prices!

We spent 3 days in total dragging our poor butts around the various flats in order to secure our dream place. We lived together in Korea but I do NOT count that as our first place together ! It was dirty, moldy, cockroach ridden and smelly. It was cold in the winter, where we spent our time in the living room and ONLY the living room, and hot in the summer, where we spent our time in the bedroom and ONLY the bedroom (which is not as fun as it may sound!) I hated going back there after being out all day, I actually really dreaded it. We have now paid a deposit on a flat that I cannot wait to get into.

We were on the verge of buying another, even considering not bothering viewing this one, but after seeing the pictures I just had to ! I am so happy we did, it has a brick wall feature, a beautiful kitchen that is open plan with the living room.
A really nice bathroom, sans bathtub but I will get over that..in time, a gorgeous bedroom that has balcony doors! I love it.

2 more hours and we will be in.

The Polish seem to love their graffiti, it is everywhere. Yesterday when we went to view this place my face fell when I was in front of our future door way, it had a spray painted giant, silver, erect penis!
“Please, please, no!”

Luckily, we got the address wrong and we happen to live NEXT to the spray painted, giant, silver, erect penis. At least it will be easy to find home!

It is time to begin.....

'till death do us part

I attended a wedding this year. Actually I attended more than 1, which is good because if my friends happen to read this (they better) then they won’t know of which wedding I talk of.

So, I was at a wedding and a family friend (of the bride) came up to me and drunkenly attacked me and my choices in life. My vegetarian choices.
I am used to it, of course, I have been a vegetarian for 11 years this month (March 2012) and I have always been the awkward one, the one who is putting everyone else ‘out!’
I remember visiting family in Newcastle and being taken to lunch. After living in Korea for 3 years, at that time, coming back to the U.K is pretty much the single most exciting thing I do for my taste buds. I drool as the plane slides into the terminal parking spot and I run the length of the arrival lounge to grab a bowl and a spoon and chow down on something that I know will be both amazing and ecologically harmless!

Therefore, when I got to Newcastle I was settled in the belief that as long as there is at least ONE thing on the menu that I can eat :
Vegetarian curry, burger, lasagna, mince...

then I am happy with ANYWHERE!
I sat in the car with my grandmother, cousin and her boyfriend and we drove around like headless chickens (GAH, how much do I hate that expression?) looking for something suitable. The first place was a quaint bar that smelled like the sea and looked like every bar in every British T.V show. I was satisfied.
I pulled out a chair, got well acquainted with the menu “ah, Vegetable curry..done”

and much to my disappointed was told that this place was not “going to do.”
We left.

This actually went on for another 2 places in which I was perfectly content. In Korea I suffer in silence with white rice and kimchi, please give me a fork and a curry! The third time I got into the car my stomach stirred louder than the engine and my grandmother shook her head in disappointment and remarked,
“We have to think of Ruth and her being a vegetarian, see?” As if I was the fussy one!
I should have reacted boldly and fought my corner but my head hung in hunger and I just looked out of the window as we left my delicious food behind.

Anyway, returning to the wedding. I had just helped myself to the buffet spread and was happily eating away at the veggie options provided for; me (there were not many other vegetarians in the room that night) and as I mentioned earlier a drunken family friend shuffled his way towards me. I was (as I always have been) easy prey for hungry carnivores and as I sat chewing on my red pepper he began to slur,
“Don’t you just want a steak? a big juicy steak?”
I probably rolled my eyes a few hundred times through this whole (mostly) one sided conversation. As the non sensical speech went on and included the cruelty that I am bestowing on plants!

I hate when meat eaters use that ‘argument!’ It is probably the single most unintelligent joke/comment I have heard and will continue to hear. I have thousands of reasons why my diet is healthier, more natural and less harmful to the world and the argument I always get back is, that I am causing pain to plants! *sigh*

The speech, at the wedding, then went on to ask me if I was planning to feed my children a vegetarian diet.
Here is my response, I like to keep my replies short and exact so that, hopefully, the discussion can finish rapidly.
“Well actually I plan not to have children but if I did, yes I would heavily consider a pure vegetarian diet for them”
“That’s child abuse that is!”

With that I agreed in a hugely sarcastic tone and the subject, thankfully, began to subside.

But now this is my blog so I get to reply in the way I really should have.
When it comes to meat eaters I have spent 10.5 years of my 11 year vegetarian ‘career’ never once telling them to become a vegetarian. I do not attack, judge, or bombard meat eaters on the subject of their diet, but for 11 years of my vegetarian ‘career’ I have been attacked, judged and bombarded about my diet and how it is tasteless, wrong and weird.
Now, it’s my turn!

If I were to have a child, which I have decided against and will address this issue in a later blog post, then I 100% stand by the idea that feeding a child a plant based diet is not abuse, but rather the opposite.

"When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up. When we dig roots, we make little holes. When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don't ruin things. We shake down acorns and pine nuts. We don't chop down the trees. We only use dead wood. But the white people plow up the ground, pull down the trees, kill everything. ... the White people pay no attention. ...How can the spirit of the earth like the White man? ... everywhere the White man has touched it, it is sore."

It is clear to me, but hazy to others, that we have destroyed our planet, and will continue to do so. If you drive along the country side you will notice a huge difference from driving along the country side years ago. There are much fewer cows and sheep on the hills grazing. They are not allowed this simple pleasure anymore, we have taken it away and put them in a shed. We have encased them within dark concrete walls, TURNING ON the sunlight when we want to trick the animals into growing and producing. Beating useless runts to death by bashing their heads against the concrete floor.
*This is a practice called thumping, I do not make anything up, I do not NEED to make anything up* I have not done enough research (yet) to argue about the topic of humans being carnivores, omnivores or herbivores but I do know that the Indians hunted down the wild animals. The animals that were free to roam until the great battle, it was not like hunting today where a man goes into the woods with a beer, a gun and a grin and shoots, from a long distance, a completely defenseless animal, just to hold up its antlers in a picture. The Indians take what they need, they thank nature for the great gift and they use all the beast. They appreciate the animal, we abuse the animal. We simply don’t deserve their life.

I will now plug the book ‘Eating animals’ I cannot praise this book enough, I adore it and am on my second reading. The author, Jonathon Safran foer, decided that having a child and deciding what he feeds the child is the single most important thing a parent does.
After a huge amount of research and even ‘breaking into’ (you cannot freely go into a factory farm as you can freely walk into a chocolate factory) a factory farm, he realizes that meat today is not something we should be eating as often as we do. It is not the fact that it is an animal with feelings that I make this judgement it is the fact that the meat is not good, it is not 'real', and it is most certainly not as healthy as some would say. Luckily for me i taught in Korea for 5 years and that put me off ever having my own children, but with 5 babies born every second it is worth having a thought and a read and a sober appreciation for those that decide to liberate their bodies.

I do no harm to anyone by munching on a pork-less sausage so that should be that...

The rice paddies are always greener...

It is sad and negative of me to continue to bash Korea for the things I don’t like here and ignore the fact that there are more than a handful of things that I do like. 
Many people will argue that since I have been living here for 4-5 years that I must love this country and that it must be doing something right, right? 
I love the independence I have here. I have money, good money, an apartment that is rent free (Korean schools pay for a foreign teacher’s rent as part of their contract) the transport system is top notch and the cities are easily coordinated. Money goes far here, and if you ignore the lure of late night bars and south east Asian travel you can save a great lump of it. 
I hate the staring, but I appreciate the reason why it is done. Korea is one of the most homogenous countries in the world.
Only recently (tail end of the 20th century) is it experiencing an influx of foreigners. Many Koreans have not seen white or black skin other than on T.V and the ‘shock’ of seeing something different is difficult to ignore.
Nonetheless, because of the short period of time that Korea has been established, as what we know today, many foreigners also lack much education about Korea before they arrive and therefore many tend to densely populate the cities that provide comfort with their westernized atmosphere, such as Seoul and Busan.
Jumping straight into the clutches of a different culture can be too much of a shock too soon.

After 6 months in Korea I suffered what could only be described as the darkest moment of my life, so far. I have not been a stranger to traveling and now I have Korea down to a tee but in February 2008 I was hit hard!
A lot happened to me in regards to relationships and, although I will not dwell on them (too much) and their insignificance, at that time they had a huge impact on my already fragile state. Now that I am older and a great deal wiser I know that relationships come and go, that being intertwined with another human being, sharing your deepest secrets and allowing your soul to be wide open to attack, judgment and scrutiny doesn’t mean that another person ‘has’ you. What I have learned, if anything, is the importance of being independent within a relationship. Although your actions should always take into consideration the partner in your life, your mind should always be free. 
Unfortunately, at 24 I still hadn’t received this valuable lesson which, it seems, only mistakes can teach you. I believed that without a man you are a failure, and therefore life with ‘any’ man is better than that! On a cold February day, 4 years ago I sat in my apartment and I lost control of myself. I felt like I couldn’t breathe and yet I didn’t wish to seek breath. I wanted to leave but I didn’t know from where I wanted to leave. I had thoughts that were so black and frightening that I was scared of being alone but wanted for no company.I have no recollection of how long this dragged on for, I just remember receiving desperate emails from my mother who told me, quite obviously, “you can come home at any time, come home!”
This, at the time, seemed an impossible feat that was not achievable since I couldn’t even leave my swivel chair.
The person who saved me at this time was Erin. My closest comrade. We shared hours at a time together and I will always be forever sorry for the way I treated her when I fell ‘into’ a man. I fell so unimaginably hard that I spent 2.5 years climbing the walls of the relationship trying to get out. Of course there were good times, but now I realize these were just the moments in which I lost my footing and had to begin the scramble again.

Erin had possibly the worse apartment that I have witnessed in Korea. She regularly spent her evenings filming the mating rituals of her bathroom cockroaches, much to the amusement of everyone else in Korea whose apartments were bug free. She had no air conditioning and if you have ever experienced Korean summers you will understand the unbearable humidity that comes with it. An air conditioner is a necessity rather than a luxury. The location was the worst part, it seems her school found the cheapest most isolated piece of wasteland they could, gave Erin the key, and run away.
Anyway, the reason I point out the poor girl’s misery is to show why we spent so much initial time together. I was possibly the closest waygook, proximity wise, to her and she needed a decent roof over her head and this, I provided. When I met a man, this is what I took away!
I remember spending hours with her on my heated floor on a mat that she bought herself to put in my place(Korean heating is under the floor boards, it is called ‘ondol’ and is possibly the single most amazing idea ever, especially since the majority of Koreans have not westernized themselves enough to sleep on beds but rather the floor) with small bite-size packets of real cheese that we purchased at 6am from the local family mart, on the way HOME from a social night.

An expat guide to Korea : cheese and Soju

Two things to mention here is cheese and drinking; 
Cheese in Korea is a rare commodity, they have it but it is expensive and considered more of a luxury rather than a weekly purchased item. Although, as I said previously I have a goal to be a vegan, as a vegetarian cheese is by far my favorite food and I know I will miss everything about it, but alas, the importance of where ones food comes from is far higher to how something tastes.
When I was ignorant to dairy issues, such as in 2008, I longed for cheese in mass quantities. Not just me but other foreigners, we planned nights around it ‘cheese and wine nights.. wine is optional!!’ Brie became my top cheese and I would eat large amounts of it on single sittings, it makes me nauseous to think I ate this way but as I once mentioned I was an uneducated 24 year old!
So, Erin and I would have nights out followed by morning cheese pig outs which were nothing short of glorious! 
Drinking is at the core of Korea’s social life. A culture that works hard and parties rather than sleeps, to compensate. Koreans, in general, work extremely hard and for long hours. Having taught adults from Korean companies including, LG Electronics, Doosan Engine, Hyosung and STX I am fully educated on the working hours of the average Korean white collar worker. 
Here are a few examples, overtime pay begins AFTER 10pm! Bear in mind work starts at 8am! 
Some workers MUST work on Christmas day ( this is not a huge holiday in Korea in comparison to the western world, but it is still a national holiday!)
Vacation time, in most of the companies, is 1 week in the summer, 1 week in the winter. (This is 5 days and does not necessarily exclude weekends) For some companies it is just 1 week for the whole year ! Now after all these hours at work wouldn’t you want to just, go home?..
I taught a vice president at LG for a short period of time and most mornings he was ‘hungover.’ This is not at all unprofessional in Korea, this is the way business is done. I was told there are three levels of socializing/doing business after hours in Korea.
Level 1 ) eating at a restaurant with drinks
Level 2 ) going onto a bar and continuing with the drinking
Level 3 ) Norea banging! (Sleep is now officially sacrificed)
*Norea bang (translation; singing room) - a karaoke room that a group can hire at a reasonable cost for private singing along with a continuous service of drinks.

The sad reality of this way of life begins and ends with the wives. My partner and I were invited to dinner with an old vice principle of mine from Masan. She is slightly older than 40 and speaks coherent English. She was always eager to help me out (sometimes to my annoyance ) but I was more than willing to accept a free dinner for myself and drag my partner along too. We went to the local Indian restaurant, which we used to love, mainly for it’s lack of Korean food!! The awkwardness that always transpires in these situations subsided quite quickly and she talked willingly about her home life and in particular, her husband. When someone tells you a story about nothing less than abandonment it is hard to hide the pity in your eyes, but we have been here for a significant amount of time and one gets used to the culture differences, we knew to nod and smile as if the tale was a funny anecdote with a never ending punch line.
“My husband was an engineer and now works as a University professor, he leaves the house around 6am and finishes around midnight”(insert disbelief followed by heads thrown back with canned laughter) “He usually goes out drinking after with his co workers and sometimes he falls asleep in restaurants!” (insert silence followed by heads thrown back with canned laughter)

A marriage is not just a convenient business contract, it is a life long commitment to that one person who you can tolerate for years on end. It should be to your best friend and that one person who wants to spend most of their spare time with YOU! I am lucky that I followed a tragic relationship with a great one. I will never say again that this is ‘the one’ but I will say that if it isn’t, then the next relationship will have to be exceptional to even compare. 
Some of the marriages in Korea sadden me. Although Korea has developed somewhat and fought hard to be more than just a confucian society, the reigns of the old society still hang around their necks and uneducated women still wish to be married before they are 30 rather than get an education!
In 2007, a co-worker, who I sat with in the teacher’s office pointed out another teacher, who had innocently and unsuspectedly come in to photocopy and subsequently become the victim of mindless gossip, the co-worker whispered into my ear,
“She is 30 and NOT married.” 
I wasn’t sure what my reaction was supposed to be since in the U.K this is a perfectly normal scenario but now I realize I should have been belching forth my disgust and pity at her obviously long and lonely future ahead.
Today, 2012, things are a little different and that is a marvelous thing to have witnessed. One woman I teach who is 30 years old has had a boyfriend for 8 years but has no plans to marry him yet and is quite open and seemingly proud of it. She has a company job ( which is still rather difficult for a woman to accomplish) she has stocks in a few Korean companies and she has her independence. She sounds rather, well ...WESTERN !
However, as I said it is still important for most women to have a husband and this rush to be accepted by society sometimes pairs women up with cavemen!
As evident with my former vice principle, it is hard to imagine that she is not actually living with the misery that her husband would rather sleep in a restaurant than come home and share a bed with her. But, because of Korean society she puts on this comic front;
‘It’s ok, this is just how it is.’

Of all the bars in all the world, you had to walk into mine.

Colin asked me to write a small introduction for his book. http://www.facebook.com/thelensoftruthgmw

Here is what I wrote on a plane ride between Kota Kinabalu and Kuala Lumpur.

10 years ago I decided to quit eating meat. It was an on-the-spot decision and a very easy one at that. I was 17 years old and didn’t eat much beyond potatoes and fish fingers. My mother was already a vegetarian and therefore all-in-all the transition seemed effortless. Within these 10 years I have traveled a lot and my appetite has pleasantly grown, I rarely eat potatoes, I have began juicing, I adore chickpeas and always experiment with what I can get my hands onto.
This was my one and only ‘contribution’ to the planet and I was satisfied with it and the thought that ‘that’ is enough.

Off to the bar.

I have written off most of my travels as a wild escape, everyone needs a vacation to really enjoy life and let their hair down, my vacation just happened to be 6 years long.
I have wasted much of my precious time and money living a life that does nothing for me, my future or the world around me. However, that isn’t to say I haven’t had a great time it just means that now, now I am ready to realize my full potential.

In November 2010 I was slightly inebriated in an Irish bar in South Korea. I had taught English there for nearly 3 years and spent most of my spare evenings drinking, dancing and complaining about my students, co teachers and ex(es). On this particular night I met the man of my dreams, I could say that he had a wonderful personality, he seemed sincere, kind and really wanted to get to know me, but to be perfectly honest all I cared about was the fact that this was, and still is, the hottest guy I had ever seen; beer goggles or not!

I caressed his face a few too many times, introduced myself, explained to him how I was going to become a vet ( a complete fabrication) and generally just tried to pick him up. I thought I had him until he soon after disappeared into the fog of smoke and I was devastated for about 5 minutes until my dear friend comforted me with a vodka and we danced the rest of the night away.

Thank goodness for modern technology and, in particular, facebook! The gorgeous man from the bar searched me out and ‘added’ me; probably the best compliment EVER !!!

Between November and March we chatted continuously online. He knew how attracted to him I was but it became a joke and I accepted the fact that we would always be ‘just friends.’

At the end of February 2011 we finally met up and something changed. I invited him to the dog shelter that I volunteered at ( http://shindogs.org ...free plugging) and after weeks of persuasion he decided he would come along. He stayed at mine the night before and he started to talk, and he talked some more, and he just continued to talk! It wasn’t just the endless talking that got my attention, but the fact that I had no idea or care for what he was saying.
I am a vegetarian, I do my part and I sleep at night. This guy seemed to care about EVERYTHING. Even the best people in the world take a break and drink a beer or veg out in front of the t.v but not this one, he just thought and wrote and talked about it all incessantly. It dawned on me that this guy couldn’t be right for me and I let out a huge sigh of relief that he had shamelessly turned me down. However, for him, I became more than ‘the drunk girl at the bar.’ I walked dogs on my weekends and loved animals. It seems I was a selfless human being and suddenly I was becoming somewhat desirable, whilst all fire that I had burning for him was dwindling and I was becoming very satisfied with the ‘friends’ label.

But, do not panic the love story had a happy ending and a few weeks later Colin and I became more than friends, with equal consent.

He still talks however, but now I really listen.

I suppose from the day that we became more than friends I have been on a roller coaster of emotions and personal turmoil. For the most part I have been deliriously happy and know that I have met my soul mate ( even though he would argue that ‘soul mates do not exist’ ) Relationships before have taught me that when you find something ‘this’ good you hold onto it and I am holding tight, which is good as this roller coaster is throwing me in all directions.
I still, to this day, believe myself to be a little more positive than my other half. Sometimes he grimaces about the world in everything he sees and does and it takes all of me not to scream in his face. I am a ‘the glass is half full’ kind of girl, and he always demands a refill.
However, now I understand him and realize his heart is huge and that all he wants is for people to know everything he does.

The world is aching and it is but the human race that has caused this. If there is only one thing I have got from dating Colin it is the knowledge that no one sees past their own noses, and no one truly cares about their neighbors. A cup of sugar or a toilet roll may be passed around in a time of need but what about the pile of plastic bottles left over after the garden party that are just too ‘inconvenient’ to recycle and just this one time will be put with the other trash?
What about the fact that sharks reproduce incredibly slowly and yet it is a must to try shark fin soup when on the menu at an over priced restaurant that cares for nothing but profit?

Is it truly ‘acceptable’ to put money into banks that only keep 10% of YOUR money in YOUR account and invest 90% into THIER own profitable schemes?

Is it right to vote for a leader knowing full well they have little actual power to ‘change’ the world because the rich like the world, just as it is?

There are 34,000 children dying every day from poverty and preventable diseases and in the U.K parents are driven into huge amounts of debt so their child has the latest computer game at Christmas, and rarely are the old toys from last year given to charity but, instead, line the garbage cans on boxing day.

*Boxing day, years ago, represented a day when all old toys were packed up into boxes, obviously, and donated to the needy. It was a day that brought the nations together now it is another excuse to stay home, get drunk and forget that the world is actually meant to be one community.

Before Colin, I made the decision that having children just wasn’t for me. They smell, they are noisy, they continually need attention and pregnancy will, more than likely, destroy my body. Yes, before Colin I was THIS conceited. My decision is the same and I still adore my body, just as it is, but more importantly I have realized that the decision I made was actually the right one, albeit for the wrong reasons.
I should say that I do not want children because I know that when I do have a child he/she will be such a huge part of me and the man whom I love that I will regret ever bringing the most important thing of my life into this dying world. That their, or their children’s future, will be uncertain and they will know little about the wild animals we marvel at today. Bears, elephants, tigers, rhinos they will be myths in a book. They will become the dinosaurs of today however, this time, the extinction will not be a long debated mystery! They wont be able to swim freely in the ocean because of the sheer amount of suffocating plastic that will forever float there.
Global warming will destroy the natural beauties of this world and places such as Antarctica will no longer be.

The rich will prosper and the poor will continue to suffer and increase in numbers. Corporations, like McDonalds will continue to steal (pay so little, it should be labelled theft) the crops of starving countries to fatten their cows who subsequently continue to fatten the people of the more prosperous side of the world.
The world is not equipped for 7 billion people and yet countries, such as South Korea, are in talks about providing free kindergartens so that parents can afford to keep pro-creating!

I have read this book that you are about to and I am extremely proud that I love a man that loves the world this much. He has chosen not to have children and yet he seems to be one of the few who cares about the future for other generations. We both have the most wonderful nephews and it is for them that we concentrate our emotions. We want the world to be something to be proud of not embarrassed by.

For those who mock or do not care, I pity you. If everyone sat up and realized that the world has become a prison, an encasement so that people simply work to survive and at the same time are too busy working to help the world survive, then maybe it wouldn’t be quite so tolerated.

I am grateful to the creator of this book for empowering me with knowledge.
I am grateful to Colin for loving me/we enough to create this book.