At whose convenience?

As well as adapting my yoga practice to travelling, I’m also adapting other behaviours. Diet is of course an area for compromise. In the city the veggie options were great, and I totally fell in love with one local restaurant in Vancouver. It had two versions of everything: one vegetarian, one full-on vegan. I’m hoping to pay another visit when we’re back in town.

Now I’m travelling with the family omnivores so the places we go to eat aren’t always very veggie-friendly. I often don’t have a choice about what to have: I eat whatever is available that is meat-free, whether or not it’s what I would have chosen. It’s an interesting practice in being open-minded to eating different things even when I sometimes don’t recognise what I’m eating(!), being grateful for the food even if I don’t actually like it, and finding where the acceptable compromises are: Hubby has started eating fish again, I’ve let go of thinking about vegetarian cheese and wine and fairly-traded coffee. On the other hand local fruit and veggies are abundant here, so there’s a plus for local and organic 🙂

One of the more uncomfortable compromises I’ve found when travelling is the use of disposable items. I’ve lost count now of the number of take-out coffees and snacks I’ve had on the planes, trains, and in roadside pit-stops, with the inevitable plastic wrappings and disposable cups. At home I’m increasingly conscious of packaging, especially for foodstuffs. Whatever else I do, I very rarely get a take-out coffee in a one-use cup or buy water in a plastic bottle. Here it’s more difficult. And I’m balancing environmental ahimsa with not being a pain to my travelling companions. It’s difficult not to come across as massively judgmental by caring about things differently, and the diet thing is hard enough for everyone to accommodate.

So I make small gestures where I can discretely. But I know my air miles are never going to be offset by my bamboo toothbrush or by my metal water-bottle!