Where Is My Home? Which Is My Country?

Roses, where I live which I had always thought of as my little town in north Spain, had been officially 'upgraded' with the status of a city in 2008. For the fact that it boasted then of having over 20.000 residents, 20,063 citizens to be exact. Maybe I myself had since March become a resident helped reach that number? Even though I had lived here for several years, up till then I was really just a tourist, despite being a house owner.

Several times in the year, especially during summer, with the influx of the number of tourists, international as well as national, coming here for sun, fun and beach, the figure usually jumps up more than 3-fold, but it's only the registered number of permanent residents count, and that was as low as 8,000 twenty years ago. The most surprising is not just that this originally a small fishing village has changed it's image over the years to have become now a modern coastal city, but the amazing discovery, for me, that the residents are made up of 80 nationalities!! In my local cafe by the sea where I go every morning there would be about 10 or more visibly different nationalities sitting about along the seafront cafes, day and night, in any season. But eighty? Quite incredible.

The only benefit of being Included as one of the residents is that I am now covered medically, and that if I so wish, I have the right to vote. This latter I had declined on my declaration, as I don't actually vote in any country, not even in my own. Precisely that's the bit that I am not sure of. Which country is mine? Although I was born on Chinese soil, my formative years were spent in HK, where I also established my profession as model and teacher, as well as naturalized as British. Then my career took me all over the world and I was nearly never in any one place long enough to make friends let alone feel actually belong to.

I have lived in several countries, including a period in Saudi Arabia. Deep in my heart I feel Chinese with all that it denotes, perhaps simply by instinct, but when I am actually in China I don't exactly feel at home there either. Not having any family or even friends there one of the reasons, despite the fact that I speak, read and write Chinese, both Mandarin and Cantonese, to my English standard; same as in Spanish. But I don't feel British, Chinese or Spanish. My British passport doesn't make me feel more British than my Chinese HK identity card makes me feel Chinese, nor my Spanish identity card as Spanish.

Maybe I am European, or more aptly just a homeless vagabond, a wanderer, imposing my presence wherever I happen to be.

Tags:Me,MyCountry,Vagabond

Current Mood: Awake

Worms, Fried, Baked Or Grilled?

A couple of my English friends just back from Thailand were saying how strange it was to see some local people buying insects for food, not for their buggies or pet monkey, but for themselves. The idea is not totally strange to me, as I do know, and have witnessed in a couple of countries visited, that people do eat them as naturally as putting on chicken, pork or beef on the table.

In Barcelona, up to not long ago, there was a very big stall, one of the dozens in the city centre's famous Municipal market, that sold a great variety of insects including worms, as food for people. They had a big, faithful and regular clientele who were used to and appreciated such, to them, delicacies. The stall had been the supplier of this specialized food for 4 years. But somehow, almost out of a blue, had to close up "till there is regulated and established norm for commercialisation that such products are considered suitable for human consumption", the Spanish Agency of Security in Food & Nutrition so stated. It caused a lot of comments from all sectors of the public, both pro and against. Since then it has remained everybody's query why it had been allowed to operate for 4 full years in the first place.

Soon after, there's an news article on the " Daily Mail ", the London press, signed by Beth Hale, in which she explained that, after long and thorough investigations, experiments and debates by scientists, they proposed that we should include insects amongst our habitual diets. Adding that when these are dried, they contain double the protein of meat; and raw fish providing rich minerals. These are in fact eaten in many countries outside of Europe through centuries. Thailand, China, Japan, Vietnam, Mexico, Bali, and New Guinea amongst them. Insects are no different from say crabs, prawns, oysters or lobsters, snails, etc.

But the most interesting part of this article was when she said that, apart from the nutritional values of insects and worms, eating them is also highly beneficial to the protection of the natural and healthy environment because, "it reduces plagues and minimizes the pressure of eating conventional meat." Conventional meat? Well, whatever that means.

The Organisation of Agriculture and Alimentation is also of the agreement that eating insects would make it more sustainable the hungry world today and it's development. To breed them for food contributes to preserving the forests, which is necessary to attract them, hence some countries have such projects to protect their forests.

Apparently the Thai government even distribute recipes of locusts, because they can't afford the expenses of enormous amount of pesticides needed to get rid of them! Now you have heard it all.

Tags:insects,worms,forest

Current Mood: Blah

Maker Vs Marker - Unusual & Entertaining Video

Maker Vs Marker is a cool stop motion animated battle between animator and animation taking place on a whiteboard. I love the creativity in this clip and found it entertaining to watch. Animation by Jonny Lawrence and Music by Brian Sadler