Well Thailand. How does it stack up on the plastic free
scale you ask? Not too badly...The hocker (sp?) stalls were a bit more hit and
miss here. The ones that I ate at, were ones where you could sit down and have
a meal (they were also mostly Malaysian stalls) But I saw a few that were only
offering food in plastic and Styrofoam. There were a few that looked like they
would have been nice to try but I didn’t. I may have been able to negotiate
with my personal container, but I couldn’t really be bothered. Also, any of the
sauce that came with the food came in a plastic bag as well. I am not sure I
could have avoided that.
There was one sit down restaurant that only had throw away
chopsticks in plastic wrap. I ate everything with a spoon, which wasn’t as satisfying
but bearable.
As far as gift giving goes, it is the same as Malaysia and
Indonesia. Lots of things come wrapped in plastic but there are wrapper free
options as well.
Straws...those blasted straws! I mostly convinced people not
to give me a straw, with some heavy pantomiming going on. It is a lot easier when you have a local to
translate for you (Thanks SK!). So once again, I stuck mostly to hot drinks.
Sometimes I just really wanted a coconut though. I got some really funny looks
when I quite adamantly refused a straw and said I would have mine with a spoon.
Hahahaha.
My birthday. Two things happened for my birthday. First off,
I couldn’t have any cake because they all came wrapped in plastic. Even the
individual pieces at the bakery. So I had a brownie, which was yummy, but not
really birthday-y. The second was I found out that a bottle of wine and a
two-six of tequila was the same price.... Ummm what? It was a very odd realization,
especially coming from Australia. Not really anything to do with plastic, but
worth sharing. I also took a picture that would be lovely to show, if the
internet would load things. I have no idea how people can upload photos on to
facebook when they travel. It must take them all day.
One sad occurrence happened in the cooking class I took
with Katie. I was very excited to take the class and thought for sure there
wouldn’t be any issues with plastic. What I did not realize was that almost all
the food prep was done for us, including the meat, which came wrapped in cling
wrap. There was nothing I could do about it. It didn’t even occur to me to
check. Nor could I have change anything. So I just accepted it, and was sad.
But the class was quite fun and the food was really good. I have the cook book
as well so hopefully I can recreate it.
It was just a short trip to Thailand and I was only in the
south. I think it would be worth checking out more of the country before really
giving an opinion about the ease of being plastic-free. There wasn’t really any
awareness that I saw about the issue. However, there was plenty of evidence in
the street that it is an issue. It is definitely time to start a massive clean-up.
