Pledge To Invest !

Herwin's Vegan Cafe started an e-funds raiser for a new vegan cafe on Silom Road. The best thing is that you can join and spread the veg lifestyle to a main road, and get your investment back with a 50% interest !
http://herwinsvegancafe.blogspot.com/

Loving Hut Pakchong !

Cute

Spacious and Airy

Finaly, finaly....FINALY i had the change to visit the one and only Loving Hut branch outside of Bangkok.
It was a place i wanted to visit and taste the food since a long time.
First of all, its very conveniently located next to the highway, so if you ever go to the Northwest of Thailand with your own car or motorbike, this is the place to eat.
Second of all, better check out before you go, because soon (as in "very soon") they will move to another location, probably very close by the present location.
The Food. Thats whats it all about, eh. Its all vegan, including some yummy looking cakes, so thats a good start. ;-) The quality of  the food was okay, but my spaghetti was still only luke warm and not hot, and the wonton soup had only a bit wonton so to speak, so the french fries with the "steak" was just a little bit too little, so i couldnt say that the food was "excellent". Sorry. Still a good vegan place though and certainly better than many other veg places in Bangkok.

Loving Hut Homepage

Fooled !!!

Somebody told me about a veg Vietnam restaurant on Charoennakorn Road, so last week monday on my free day, uppadido, i did go check out this place.

So yes, this place has a big VEGETARIAN MENU sign outside, very promising and i did go inside, only to find that the menu for at least half is not veg but with seafood and meat. Vegan Bummer.
No sweat though, a few busstops away is the Loving Hut Marriot, so thats where i ended up that day having a fantastic vegan meal.

Closed

Recently Central Plaza Lad Prao opened after a long renovation. Sadly enough, the vegetarian restaurant in the foodcourt is no more.

page 11, BANGKOK Vegan Restaurant Pocketguide

Happy Vegetarian Festival, Everybody !

Today the ten-day vegetarian (actually it's vegan...) Kin jay festival kicked off. For ten days the streets in Thailand will be filled with street vendors selling veg foods, some regular non veg restaurants will only serve veg for these ten days, shopping malls have special veg food isles, and a couple of million Thai people will eat vegetarian for ten days. Another couple of million people will be veg occasionally during these ten days.
Doesnt this mainstream Thai festival beats Christmas ?
Ten days eating only vegs as a kind of cleansing for the body and the spirit. Long before Oprah did it and long before it became hip and fashionable with the Hollywood celebs.
Isn't that cool ? isn't that hip ?

Here are some pics from todays newspaper.

Half page add of 7-11 advertising its veg meals.
They are tasteless but its great to see veg meals in the 7-11 !
The red symbol in the yellow circle is the "vegetarian sign".
 

FRONT PAGE NEWS
Vegetarian meats for sale in shops have been checked by the city of Bangkok and many found to contain real meat. The photo shows a table loaded with confiscated veg meats mixed with real meat.

Holy Crapola 2

This is an oldie, and i hesitated a long time to post it, just don't want to spread negative things about vegetarian places. But .... the truth..... it should be told.

Grandpa tells.
One year ago i was eating in one of my regular places, a Jay booth at a foodcourt at Soi Silom 32, right behind the Family mart, and i did bite on something hard. It looked like a bone splinter so i took it home for closer inspection. It turned out to be a small bone fragment from chicken bone, you know, chicken bones like all bird bones are spongy structured inside to make their bones light in order to fly, very caracteristic.

I have shown the cook/owner the bone fragment, and he was so "very surprised". I of course "believe" him from thye bottom of my tiny toe, that he "didnt know" it.

Anyway, flavoring fake meat dishes with chicken or fish broth is not uncommon sometimes, unfortunately. Just stick with the vegetables.

BANGKOK Vegan Restaurant Pocketguide page 98

Holy Crapola !

Vegetarian Restaurant CORNER near Samsen road,, just a few minutes from Kaosan road and May Kaidee, has gone Bacon and Ham !
Not a surprise though, when they were still "vegetarian", i saw the owner and friends having a party with lots of seafood. Since it was private and the menu was at the time completely veg, the restaurant was added in the Bangkok Vegan Restauramnt Pocketguide.
You can bet your caboush , even if they ever would go veg again, they lost their place in the veg pocketguide.
Good luck with your new Ham and Bacon customers ! You wont see us the vegheads no more.

BANGKOK Vegan Restaurant Pocketguide page 60

The Best Vegan Restaurant In Bangkok : Loving Hut Nonthaburi

Today was my day off, so that means sleep a little longer, and do some grocerie shopping with the biky in the morning.

After twelve it's time for relaxing outside.

Today we did go to the Loving Hut Nonthaburi branch. Loving Hut is the only veg restaurant here in Bangkok that serves authentic vegan Thai food. I know, there are other upscalish veg restaurants that serve "thai" vegetarian dishes, like the fancy Churn Kun at Sukumvit, but these restaurants target foreigners and so have adapted their Thai dishes to foreign tastebuds. Very nice food but don't take your Thai friends there.
The only other authentic Thai vegan flavors come from the jay restaurants which serves a kind of fusion Thai-Chinese vegan food.

Not only is the Loving Hut the only place that serves authentic Thai dishes vegan style, it is also prepared with great care and much love, and it may sounds corny to some people, but my taste buds really can taste the diference between food prepared with great care by a great dedicated cook, or "good food" that is prepared by a less dedicated cook.

We did go with taxi from the Silom area, tollway, it wasn't so far as i imagined, around 40 minutes or so and costs were 55 baht for the tollway and 185 baht for the taxi ride.

All dishes are between 45~65 baht, which is extremely cheap for this kind of quality food. When we arrived there were about 4 or so Thai customers, looked like office workers, enjoying their meal. We ordered about.....8 or 9 dishes, or even more, and three drinks. I guess we were in a decadent mood. Kidding. Our final bill was 500 something baht. Anybody who regularly eats in restaurants (that doesnt include greasy street vendors or cheap buffets) knows that is a bargain.

I did choose two appetizers, mushroom tempura (three diferent kinds of mushroom) and Crispy wonton filled with Spinach. Both were very crispy and no oil taste, very skilfully prepared.

The masaman curry was prepared with  fake chicken soy nuggets and potatoes. It had an peanutty very rich taste. It was defenitely the best masaman curry i ever ate, and inspired me to also try to make this kind of masaman curry.

Chinese Olive Fried Rice was another "simple looking" but very tasteful dish.

I/we did eat several other dishes and ended our culinary travel with a vegan icecream (there were three flavors ; chocolate, chocolate chip and strawberry) and a brownie.

Nonthaburi might seem a bit far away, but it isn't. The trick is to go by tollway and in the morning or early afternoon before 1 pm, and take a taxi back to Bangkok around three-ish. That way you avoid the nasty traffic jams that start around 4 pm.

Loving Hut Nonthaburi is also a short taxi ride away from the new Immigration office at Chaeng Watana road.

Pleasant relaxed atmosphere. There are various vegan cooking books for reading. Cook, staff and owner are all dedicated vegans.

Two crispy tasty appetizers for 100 baht together.

Forgot the name of this dish (fried rice something) but it was yummy.

So in short, no it isn't that far away and well deserves to be visited and enjoyed, especially since there is no equal vegan quality to be found in Bangkok itself.

website of all Loving Hut branches in Thailand

Unhealthy Vegan Cookies !

Craving for a vegan snack loaded with sugars and other ingredienst that will rot your teeth away and give you that instant sugar rush ? Search no more, here is the Orea cookie, availabel in all (most) convenience stores. They come as cheap as 5 baht for a pack of two cookies.
Warning, ONLY the blue cookies are vegan, other colors/flavors are not vegan.

My Rooftop Garden

Here in the vegan cafe we collect our uncooked vegetable left overs, mix them with soil (and the poot poot from our cat) and stash it all at the rooftop in plastic garbage bins from Big C.

I did it with the idea of starting a rooftop garden, but Mother Nature sure did beat me and started a garden on her own. Without doing nothing and to my surprise,  a pepper plant started to grow, two lemon trees and a mango tree (still size mini), several tamarind trees (they grow pretty fast), and the cut off pineapple tops started to grow roots.

I joined Mother Natures party and did throw in some tomato seeds and coriander seeds from Big C. And this week papaya seeds (we did eat the papayas and saved the seeds) and bellpepper seeds (saved from the real thing), will be tossed into the soil.
Bellpeppers (aka capsicum) are about twenty baht a piece on the local market, so harvesting them from the rooftop garden will make my wallet happy.
Besides that, home grown veggies are fresh and organic and yummy.

Yabadabadee. If you're looking for me, i am on the roof...

A few days later this pepper turns bright red.

Tomato seeds from Big C work well. Pineapple top grows roots.

This mango tree will provide me with fresh organic mango's, in about fifteen years.
 

Lemon tree growing from thrown away lemon seeds. I can use the lemon leaves for several Thia dishes.

Anti Coal Activist Gunned Down

Last week in Samut Sakhon province a local activist protesting against the air pollution from the local coal producers, was gunned down.

Read more in the Bangkok Post how failing authorities get slapped in the face by the Central Administrative Court and how it is not uncommon for succesful activists to get killed or dissapear with little interest from local authorities.

THONGNAK DID NOT DIE IN VAIN

My Second BIVA Meeting

Tonight i did go to a BIVA meeting at Sukhumvit Soi 4. Since today is NOT my free day i did go only for an hour and then, after a few small talks, looking around, enjoying the tasty Jay buffet (no worries, all vegan) and right before the lecture of the evening started ("From Illness To Wellness"), off i go on the biky, back to the cafe to cook for the customers.

In case you don't know the BIVA, here are some facts. The BIVA stands for Bangkok International Vegetarian Alliance and is founded by mr "Paul" Pornthep Srinarula ten years ago in october 1991. Mr Paul is vegan himself. The BIVA is mainly attended by Indian people, Thai people, and the occasional veg ex pat living in Bangkok.

The BIVA has its own Facebook page
www.facebook.com/go.biva

Letter To The Editor

Anyone who cares for animals and their welfare and rights, knows that deep feeling of frustration when reading for the umpth time about  some animal cruelty or animal injustice, and just don't know how to contribute to stopping these injustices.
Organising demo's or petitions is great, i did and do it regularly, from flyering anti fur brochures in front of posh shops selling fur in Tokyo, to monthly demo's in front of the Canadian embassy.
But it takes much time and even more energy to find other dedicated fellow activists to organise such a thing. And sometimes that only adds up to the frustration.

The irony, we organise demo's in the hope media picks it up, while sometimes we just can skip the whole foreplay and just cut the cake where it has to be cut  and directly send a Letter To The Editor and get our message posted directly on prime newspaper space with minimum time and energy and without need to drum up fellow activists !

Last week i saw this idiotic article in the Bangkok Post from some Thai official who is responsible for decimating the water monitor lizard population in Lumpini Park here in Bangkok. These up to two meter long gentle giant lizards, a protective species, are native to Bangkok, they travel around the city in the stinky smelly canals and the underground waterdrainage, and live in the parks in Bangkok. Peacefully.
People are people, and people complain about everything, so also about these reptiles, nothing new, only new thing is that some official did take the complaints seriously and started to catch a few hunderd of these animals and remove them.

from the article:

"their droppings are smelly"
"one woman needed hospital care when a lizard fel on her head."
"the numbers have increased rapidly" (probably isn't true but only scaremongering tactics from officials)
"watermonitors creep behind a bush" (the useage of negative words like "creep" in photo captive)

I've seen this before, if nobody stands up, these idiotic decimating campaigns creep on, but when people speak out against it, these culling programs stop soon.
In short, i have written my opinion about it, and emailed to the Bangkok Post and the next day on a monday it was published. Twenty minutes of my time, not even a stamp needed, and last monday a couple of thousand people did read about the Lumpini Lizard topic. Frustration turned into a feeling of accomplishment
Maximum result for minimum effort.

Letter To The Editor

Letter To The Editor is an effective way of reaching many people and sharing your thoughts on a current topic.

Here is a LTE from Peta activist Ning commenting on the absurd plans of the Chiang Mai Zoo to exhibit Polar Bears.

Thailands Illegal Trade in Endangered Animals

I guess anybody knows and at least visited one time Chatuchak Market, Bangkok's biggest flea market. One section of this market offers a lively trade in all kinds of animals, from domestic pets to exotic pets to endangered animals ripped out of their natural habitat. It's always sad and sickening to see these animals, wether it are too young "cute" baby pets like rabbits, hamsters or dogs, sometimes they are already dying in a corner of their cage, or the exotic pets that obviously don't beling at all in a cage.
Chatuchak market (surprise surprise) also seems to be a popular spot for buying endangered animals, which is illegal of course. Often these animals are then smuggled to other countries where people buy high prices for exotic and endangered animals. Besides being illegal, catched in the forest to the Chatuchak market, after that smuggled out of Thailand, it's cruel and many of these animals die of these hardships.

Here is an article of CNN of a person who was caught while trying to smuggle three suitcases full with exotic animals, that he had baught on Chatuchak market.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/02/10/thailand.wildlife.smuggling/index.html?hpt=T2

What can be done against the cruel animal trade on markets like Chatuchak ?

South Korea is Torturing Pigs.

Currently South Korea has to deal with foot and mouth disease, caused by the, what else is new, factory farms.
Measures for controling this disease are shocking and barbaric ; healthy pigs are collected with trucks and tossed in big holes in the ground and buried alive. How many ? According to the Huffington Post a staggering 1.4 million pigs are buried alive.

I wasn't aware of this epic and sickening drama (as far as i know it's not in the mainstream media) until i did read a post in the Bangkok Post about the subject, by Eric Bahrt.
Eric Bahrt, in a brilliant and effective post, and only three sentences long, asked for the "dear readers" to take action.

To read about such a sickening and massive animal cruelties it might make a person (like you or me who cares about animals) feel sick, sad, frustrated and ultimately with a paralising feeling that we are powerles to stop such cruelties.
To stop negative feelings take control over us and make us paralise and turn us into cynic tv watching potato chips eating zombies, it's best to take some action. To do something makes us feel better, and the more people really DO something, the faster animal cruelty will be stopped.
I always have a small problem that i want to do TOO MUCH and usually that fails and makes me feel...like shit. I would like to organise a big demo and invite the press, bla bla bla, but usually such an idea strands because cant find other people to join, don't have enough time myself, etc.
So actually to do something SMALL that doesnt take too much, is the best, because we actually can do it, learn from it, and next time we feel confident in doing again something.

Anyway, Eric is a perfect example how to get the most out of your personal time and energy. All he does is write an email and send it to the Bangkok Post. When they publish it, many thousands of people will read it !

I didn't want to read such terrible news and do nothing, so at night i Googled and made a list of all the Korean embassies i could find. I did send them a short (polite) email. About 20 emails bounced back because they outdated. I removed these outdated emails from the list, and the next day i did send these 70 email addresses to about 8 of my Peta friends and asked them to send an email to protest against the bury of pigs alive.

For me, writing one email and sending it to 70 embassies, well, that's a good balance. If some of my Peta friends also did send an email (would take 3 minutes to copy and paste the addresses, write a few lines, and push the "send" button...) than i think our time has been spend in a productive way.

Occasionaly i write, sometimes to shops who sell fur, magazines who publish articles about animal cruel foods like Fois Gras, etc. From experience i know that just one person writing, can make a diference.

I hope to organise myself better this year and start a more regular writing "campaign".
Oh, by the way, my writings are usually about Thailand, Thai shops , Thai magazines, etc.

Thanks everybody who joined Eric and did email to the embassies.

Campaign against the cruel Exotic Skin Trade.

I already did posted some photo's from last week's Peta demo right here in Bangkok, in front of the Hrmes shop at the Emporium shopping mall at Sukhumvit, on the http://www.herwinsvegancafe.com/ website. The demo was part of a Peta campaign against the use of skins of reptiles  for the fashion industry. Peta has made an undercover investigation and did shoot some pretty impressive disgusting material of snakes being stripped from their skin and tossed in the garbage bins while still alive. Sickening. Not recommended but if you have doubts about the cruelties, please watch the Peta undercover video.

Besides the individual cruelty for the animals, whole forests are stripped from their native snake and other reptile populations and transferred into bags, boots and whatever.

Anyway.

It's amazing how effective these Peta campaigns are. All this protest needed was basically one activist girl bodypainted as a snake (some misstook her for a lizard though, probably because of the legs and arms) between a few plants. Costs : one ticket to get the Peta Girl from the Peta office in Manilla, and 6 plants.

The next days the generated attention in the newspapers was enormous. Many newspapers, Thai as well as newspapers from Mexico, Germany and Canada, had at least a photo from the Peta girl and some lines.

The Thai "Thaipim" newspaper had a full page about the campaign, see photo up, including photo's from the protests as well as various photo's from snakes being skinned and text about the exotic skin industry.

Thai newspaper "Thai Rath" , see photo below, had a photo showing the Snake Girl with a sign "HERMES animals suffer for exotic skins" and an Emporium guard (orange uniform and eyes closed, because he is a bit shy talking with a half naked farang woman) who elbows his way into the foreground and demands his 5 minutes of fame. Just kidding, he tries to pursue her to leave. HA ! All in vain, mr Orange, you don't know Peta , i guess, these grrrrls are tough like a rock. :-)

Anyway, money wise, this generated attention for an animal cruelty issue, is a total bargain, almost a giveaway.

Hey, wait a minute, who's that guy between the Lizard Woman and the Orange Superdude ? O wait, it's me... :-P

The Vegetarian Festival has started.

Kinda yesterday the Kin Jay (= vegetarian food) Festival started and o boy, it's fun. While on the other 355 days of the year it kan be challenging (but not too challenging that is..) to find veggie food, for now ten days the streets are filled with vegan foodstalls, supermarkets like Tops offer vegan (no egg, no milk) bakery products, and even some (but not too many) regular restaurants serve only strick Jay Food. And today Carrefour placed a one page advertisement in the Thai newspapers advertising only Jay products.

In my neighborhood, the Silom district, the place to go is the market opposite the Indian Temple Wat Kaek on Silom, the market is on Soi Silom 20. At the beginning of the soi on the left, a regular Thai restaurant has gone Jay. Wanted to visit yesterday but too crowded. On the right-side of the market, halfway, another regular petit local restaurant has gone Jay for ten days. The Jay food here, is surprisingly much better than the usual jay restaurant. Maybe because this Jay-for-ten-days restaurant uses more fresh ingredients.
Besides these two noteworthy veggie places, there are 3 or 4 more jay options.
If you are in the neighborhood, this market is a good place to go.
All Jay places can be easily recognised by the funny charming triangular shaped yellow red little flags with a chinese caracter and/or the Jay sign.

Tiger Cub Intercepted At Airport

A  sedated tiger cub was discovered between stuffed toys in a woman's oversized luggage heading to Iran.
Since animal welfare laws are absent in Thailand the woman probably will get scolded "naughty girl, don't do that anymore!" and can walk out of the airport free..
read the full article

Thai Vegetarian Festival 2010

This year the vegan Thai Vegetarian Festival will be from 8 october to 16 october.

Here is a nice description of the festival.

PETA Hits The Thai Paper (Again)

Animal Rights organisation PETA regularly makes it to the Thai newspaper.

Last year december i spotted an INK NOT MINK in the Daily News

This week another PETA lady urges us to GO VEG in the same Daily News

detail :

PETA Asia

Hong Kong Vegan Meetup Goes Bangkok

The Hong Kong Vegan Meetup will visit Bangkok next month ! There will be two meetups and veggies here in Thailand are very welcome to join.

The meetups will be on saterday june 12th  in Herwin's Vegan Cafe, and in the context of the wordlwide Meat Free Monday campaign, the second meetup will be on monday june 14th in Khun Churn, one of Bangkok's best vegetarian restaurants. Stylish, yet relaxed atmosphere, great food, and 20 second walk from Ekkamia station.

Read more and please contact Shara Ng for further details :
Hong Kong Vegan Meetup

Teach The Children

Look at this mural painting at a schoolyard at Petchaburi Rd, Bangkok, explaining in details about Global Warming, isn't it beautiful ?

In the center of this infopainting we can see a farting cow, besides funny, it's a reference to the United Nations report Lifestocks Long Shadow that concludes "livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport."

Read that again, and now in plain english :

"the meat we eat causes 18% of all greenhouse gasses."

And lets not forget about deforestation, degredation of fertile soil and turning them into desertlike places, excesive waterconsumption for cattle while there is a growing worlwide watershortage, feeding crops to cattle in a very uneconomic way to make 1 kg of meat from 15 kg of good vegetables, obesity, colon cancer, and other diseases caused by meat consumption, and last but certainly not the least, the extreme inhumane way we treat our animals.

Go Vegan Go Green

i got inspired..

i changed the name of this blog from "Vegan Thailand" to "Code Green In Bangkok" because blogging only about vegan things here in Bangkok is rather limited. I will blog about my adventures at the supermarket refusing plastic blags, about my new bycicle and driving in the streets here, and of course about things vegan, because Bangkok with its 90 or more veggie restaurants has a lot to offer.

The Biggest Veggie Festival Of The World

From october 18 to october 26 was the Jay Festival here in Thailand. Its not a festival in a park with groovey people and yoga booths, but it's all over Thailand and many people participate and eat for this period of time only strict vegetarian foods.

"Jay" comes from Chinese Buddhism and is strict veggie food, also garlic and some other spices are not used.
There are two commonly used signs for Jay ; the thai เจ and a chinese caracter that i cant type here, sorry, but you can see it in the photo. Colors for both signs are typically yellow and red.

In a country with 65 million people, it isnt unfair to say that millions of people actively join this festival each year so that this is the Biggest Veggie Festival In The World.

Here are some pics i took in Bangkok.

A week or so before the festival starts, companies advertise their Jay products. Here a bus with a jolly caracter holding a banner with the Jay sign.

Bookshops have made special isles with only Jay books.

Saterday october 16th the festival starts in Chinatown with a colorful parade.
It's crowded with people, food booths and there is also a national bigshot waving a flag in front of the cameras.

For 8 days many restaurants stop selling meat and fish and become totally vegetarian. (after the festival the yellow / red Jay signs will be taken away)

Busy busy busy, the jay restaurants and jay foodstalls outside are doing good business.
Jay (veggie) food stalls are not restricted to Chinatown, they are simply everywhere and in all Thai cities.
All 7-11's have posters advertising their Jay food meals. Inside the 7-11's much yellow and red Jay flags. The Jay food of 7-11 is really tasteless, to say it politely.
After the festival the 7-11 doesnt offer Jay meals anymore. Jay foods are strict vegetarian, besides no meat and no fish, also no milk and no egg.

hello there

If you stumble upon this blog, feel free to drop a message. Any vegans out there in BKK looking for some activities like organising a vegan meetup group or doing some AR activities ?

herwin1234(at)hotmail.com

Meat Free Monday

Sign the petition for a Meat Free Monday in Taiwan !
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/meat-free-monday-taiwan.html

Concrete Jungle

Bangkok sure is a dirty and unappealing city. Streets filled with old cars and tuk tuk's farting their sickening fumes, canals that are the cities open sewers, concrete buildings radiating the sunshine's heat and echo-ing the street noise that it's hard to have a conversation in these streets.

After a few months of living here, another more eappealing image emerges though. It's that of a city that harbours exciting wildlife between its boundaries. Beginning of June i saw monitors right here in the centre. Well, since then i saw and photographed these awsome waterdwellers several times more across the city, both 1,5 meter adults as well as 40 cm young ones. Seems there is a healthy and thriving population of these monitors !

5 foot monitor in its favourite city habit; a stinky smelly canal.

checking holes and flicking it's snake-like splitted tung hoping to get a whiff of rat-smell, its favourite snack.

A younger 3 feet dark-colored one, photographed from above

In an empty house in Silom, a 20 cm Tokeh Gekko sits on the floor. It's changing it's skin and cant walk the walls right now.

Squirrels navigate throughthis city using the electrical wires and nooks and crannies of buildings.

Bangkok's most prominent animal inhabitant must be the rat. Unlike in the west, people refreshingly seem to be less uptight about these inteligent mammals. A night guard on Silom, making clumsy movements to kick a cornered fat rat, was loudly obstructed by a passerby who jumped between guard and rat so the rat could run away. The guard seemed to be reliefed with this happy ending.

Countless 10 cm lizards on walls hunting the mosquitos near the neon lights. Small bats and big bats speeding through the air for a juicy fat insect.
Bangkok has its fair share of wildlife, a real treat that makes this city more interesting to live in.

Say It Loud ; PLASTIC is OUT

After Japan where its now getting fashionable to go shopping with your own eco-bag instead of accepting plastic bags in the shops and where some supermarkets start to charge one yen or so for plastic bags instead of doling them out freely, and other countries like Taiwan , the Anti-Plastic wave did reach Thailand although yet in small waves.

just the other day saw this poster hanging in Robinson department store, Silom Road. The text on the bag reads "Go Green plastic is out!"

the Not-So-Vegetarian Restaurant TAMARIND EXPRES

Slowly i am getting around here in this smelly noisy city and starting to explore the veggie restaurants.

Last weekend i did go to the MBK Center, for anybody not living in Thailand, the MBK Center is a big posh modern Shopping Center especially populair with tourists and foreigners. (Thai people buy the same things somehwere else cheaper...;-) )

The MBK Center has 6 floors and each floors has restaurants. Before i did go i did a little digital research and the results showed 4 possible veggie restaurants.

The most awkward was the TAMARIND EXPRES on the 5th floor. While the restaurant advertises itself as "Vegetarian", it also sells "Ham Sandwiches" and "Chicken Sandwiches". (i checked, its not Soy Chicken..)

And now it comes. The staff explains to me that some customers don't eat vegetarian food.

Actually, this seems to be something specifically "Thai". A while ago i had the same experience in a food stall outside Bangkok selling JAY food. ("JAY" is thailands equivalent for "strict-vegetarian". When i saw chicken and pork noodles in this "JAY" booth, the staff told me the same ; "some customers dont eat JAY ".

Anyway, visiting the  MBK, the 6th floor has a great and cheap vegan foodstall number C-8.