Thursday, April 10, 2014

Living in the Land of Tiny Napkins

Despite the fact that I am still bewildered by half the things I see and hear in Taiwan, I feel like our whole family has finally settled in!  We moved past the 3 month slump into vacations with friends, Christmas holidays, Chinese New Year celebrations and first semester grades.  The kids all did incredibly well academically and are on firm footing with new friends as well.  Phew!  We’re now well into the spring semester at all the schools, I’m on my 4th Chinese class, our schedule has become familiar, and we’re trying to explore our surroundings more.  Even with all those blessings, somehow I can’t help but writing about my two pet-peeves in Taiwan, they're making me a little insane! :)

My first pet peeve?  Tiny napkins. I know, I know, it sounds so lame.  And it’s not a big deal compared to real problems, but I soooo miss real napkins.

When you go into any restaurant in Taiwan, whether it’s Taiwanese food, other Asian food, or western food, you get the same kind of napkin: it’s the size of a cocktail napkin with the strength and consistency of a Kleenx.  They are the most useless and wasteful napkin ever.  (Notable exception to this rule is Chili’s restaurant. Yes, I’m referring to the American chain restaurant that I have no desire to eat at in the US, but that tastes pretty damn good while living here and craving the occasional American burger.)

Anyway, if you’re anywhere other than Chili’s and find yourself actually having to use one of these tiny napkins during a meal, one will do you absolutely no good.  A minimum of 10 is required just to wipe your mouth and your hands.  Heaven forbid your kid spills something, then you go through a whole pile of the useless things and start begging your table neighbors for their portion of tissues.  There are not many things I think the US gets right when it comes to “super sizing,” but napkins are definitely one of those things!  I have a Taiwanese friend who carries a cloth napkin in her purse to clean her kids up and I’m actually considering doing that.  I guess it’s more eco-friendly anyway, but seriously, WHY do they have these tiny Kleenx napkins???

My second pet-peeve is plastic bags.  This is an overdone topic in many circles, but I am living in a country being over-run by plastic bags!  It absolutely does not matter what you’re buying, they put it in a plastic bag.  You could be buying a single package of (plastic) trash bags and they would put it in a plastic bag for you to take home.

At the grocery store, you have to have your fruit and veggies weighed at a station in the produce section before you go to the cashier.  They insist on putting your bananas in a plastic bag and then putting the price sticker on the plastic bag.  They refuse to put the sticker on the banana itself.  People!  Bananas come in their own wrappers, with a little handle on top, they don’t need a plastic bag!

My favorite example is when you buy a drink…they have these fancy little machines that seal a plastic lid on top for you and then they give you a special plastic bag to carry it in.  Huh?  They just sealed the top of the thing, it’s not going to spill, even when you poke the straw through the top. But every day you see people walking down the sidewalk holding their cup with a plastic bag wrapped around it,  just sipping away…  I’m so confused by this!

At the local fruit and veg market, I go to the same stand to buy my veggies every week.  This lovely lady can’t seem to help herself, everything is put in a separate plastic bag before it goes into my re-usable cloth bag.  Please, just dump everything in the bag, I’m taking them straight home, I am not worried if they touch each other on the way.  After months of telling her that I don’t want plastic bags (in Chinese even!), last week when I showed up to buy my veggies, she actually laughed and said, “I know! You don’t want bags!”  Hallelujah, a breakthrough!

This has actually moved beyond being a pet-peeve with me.  Here’s my story about why plastic bags are the devil.  We keep hearing about how plastic bags don’t biodegrade, how they will fill up our landfills and oceans, how they are made out of petroleum, use a valuable natural resource, yada yada yada.  But it’s one thing to hear these arguments and buy your reusable bag and think you’ve done something good; it’s a whole different thing to stand in the ocean in Bali, Indonesia on your vacation and feel plastic swirling about your legs as you gaze upon a beach filled with garbage.

For Chinese New Year holiday, we took our first family vacation from Taiwan.  This is the only holiday that lines up for all three of the kid’s schools, so it was a real treat for us.  We rented a beautiful Balinese villa in Seminyak, Bali with another family.  On the first full day there, we walked 15 minutes to the beach to enjoy the view and frolic in the ocean.  When we arrived, there was a line of garbage on the beach as far as we could see.

Usually when you go to the beach you see a line of ocean flotsam: logs, seaweed, bits and pieces of natural materials that the waves brought in. At least that’s been my experience so far. But on the beach in Bali, what we saw was plastic…bags, utensils, yogurt-type containers, bottles, wrappers, etc. 

It was unsettling to look out over the garbage-strewn beach, but it was clearly a popular spot with chairs and umbrellas and restaurants all along it, so we rented 4 chairs and plopped down.  The guys who sold us the chairs raked up all the garbage in front of them and made us a nice clean beach area.  Thanks guys!

Fifteen minutes later, that same area was full of garbage that had come in with the waves.  We were a little surprised and a lot repulsed, none of us read that beaches in Bali looked like this.  Then we all headed for the water for a refreshing swim…and this is when we were truly horrified.  I was standing in the water up to my knees and I could feel stuff swirling about my legs.  I assumed it was seaweed and other ocean-y type stuff, but when I looked down, all I could see were plastic bags and other plastic garbage, just floating in the water.  It was everywhere.

Later we asked some locals about the beach.  They explained there had been heavy rains and flooding on the nearby island of Java.  When flooding like that happens, everything floats away into the ocean (including the garbage) and it gets caught in the currents and distributed throughout the world via ocean currents.  It just so happened that a lot of it had been caught in the bay where we were staying and it would take some time for it all to work its way farther out to sea. 

Which part of this explanation was the most disturbing?  I can’t choose.  The entire thing was so appalling, and then it was compounded by another story later in our stay. One guide said it used to be everything in Bali came wrapped in banana leaves, which are plentiful on the island and obviously biodegrade over time.  People did not worry about discarding banana leaves on the side of the road, they would eventually turn to soil.  But with the advent of the plastic bag and everything switching to the “new, modern” way of doing things (i.e. wrap everything in plastic), somehow people retained their behaviors and continue to discard plastic as if it’s banana leaves.  It’s creating a huge garbage problem for the island, and when they get heavy rains, it all washes downhill and eventually ends up in the ocean. 

So, here is an island that used to have a sustainable, environmentally friendly way of packaging their goods, but they have switched over to using plastic and now have an environmental disaster on their hands.  And because the island relies so heavily on tourism, and tourists don’t want to stare at a garbage problem, it’s eventually going to affect everything from their land to their livelihoods.

It only takes a little extrapolation to understand that this is not an island problem “somewhere else” in the world.  Our friends that we vacationed with remember New Jersey beaches being closed because of too much medical waste (syringes!) washing up on shore. Companies sent their waste out on barges and dumped it in international waters.  This is a problem everywhere. 


I didn’t mean for this blog to turn into a diatribe against plastic, but when I started talking about all the plastic bags in Taiwan, I felt compelled to share how sad, mad, and discouraged I was after our visit to that beach in Bali.  By the way, so many other things about Bali were wonderful, especially the people. After that trip, I re-resolved not to take plastic bags or buy any more plastic than is absolutely necessary.  It’s a small thing, and I’m only one person, but at least I’m in a position to do something.  And hey, I’ve mastered a new Chinese phrase: “Bu yao, xie xie, wo you wode daizi,” which roughly translates to “Don’t want, thank you, I have my own bag.”  I haven’t yet figured out how to say, “Why would I need a plastic bag, you sealed the lid on that thing?”  But I’ll figure it out eventually, I’m sure. J

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