Tonight is Halloween and many children will go from door to door, dressed up for a ‘trick or treat’ game. An evening with a pleasantly disturbed horror atmosphere for young – and maybe also some not so young. Like it or not, there’s no escaping it! But the real horror is hidden in the candy bag.
A couple of weeks ago, Belgian organisation BE Vegan organised the second edition of Vegan Summerfest. We went to the first edition in 2015 (see our post here) and surely did not want to miss it! This year, the festival was in the Artcube in Ghent, where BE Vegan had also hosted a talk by Jo-An McArthur last Winter (see blogpost here). A more spacious venue than last year, with more room inside and outside. We went early to avoid the big crowd as much as possible and to secure a parking spot nearby (by the time we left early afternoon, people were already parked several blocks away from the venue). The foodtrucks were outside and inside were two halls with stalls of organisations like Bite Back, Animal Rights, and also several shops selling shoes, books, food and cosmetics. With benches to sit down and relax a while. During the afternoon, there were some talks in yet another hall. Would have loved to hear Ruby Roth‘s ‘Vegan is Love‘ talk (via Skype), but that was scheduled for the late …
Ieperfest is a 3-day hardcore music festival, just outside Ypres (Ieper, 75km from Bruges, Belgium). Since day one, more than 20 years ago, all the food at Ieperfest is vegan! It was two years ago that we went to Ieperfest (see our blogpost here), and it was a wet edition in 2014. This time, it was a beautiful Summer weekend, and we went again one afternoon to try out the vegan goodies and enjoy the atmosphere. We tried to taste something from each foodstall, but by the end of the afternoon were too stuffed to accomplish that plan 😉 Payment for food and drinks was with tokens: we paid 66 euros for 30 tokens in total. Our plan was to start our food trip with the Flemish stew with seitan and potatoes from the Ieperfest Hardcore Foodstall, but it was announced it was only available from 5PM onwards. Bummer! So we started with a Dutch weedburger and some ‘Wish ‘n Chips’, that latter being a new ‘algae’ based dish from TDW. Nice! Here’s an overview of the food and drinks we had: …
Sea Shepherd is international marine wildlife conservation organization. They use direct action tactics to protect marine life, for example disturbing whale vessels and seizure and destruction of drift nets. One of their ships, the Sam Simon, embarked in Antwerp for a couple of days and was open for public visits. I visited the ship with a Dutch friend earlier in the week (review with many more pics of the Sam Simon will follow here). On that visit, I gave a donation to Sea Shepherd, and as such entered the lottery to win a dinner for two on Saturday evening on board the ship, with the crew and Tom Waes. As it is with lotteries, one never expects to win … But this time, I did! 🙂 I got a call on Saturday afternoon and of course I gladly accepted the dinner invitation for two. We had the opportunity to talk to the crew and some volunteers from Sea Shepherd Belgium. And we also met Tom Waes (Belgian actor, director and TV-presentor), who is an ambassador for Sea Shepherd and Captain Alex Cornelissen (CEO …
Last weekend, we went to a vegan festival in the Netherlands. This was the second edition of VegfestNL, this time in Utrecht. Utrecht is only about 2 and a half hours drive from Bruges. The festival was not coincidentally on November 1, which is World Vegan Day. It was located in the Jaarbeurs of Utrecht, a big conference and event hall at the edge of the city. There is supposedly parking nearby, but when we arrived, all nearby parkings were announced as full and the surroundings seemed like a big construction site. Very confusing to get there. Luckily, we found a parking space in one of the streets not too far away, but then it was still quite a walk to the festival venue! It was not a free festival like Vegan Summer Fest a couple of weeks ago in Belgium (see our review here), but with an admission fee of 10€ (which still seems reasonably fair, although it does increase the treshold for a lot of people). There were seperate halls with dozens of stalls, selling food, …
On Saturday October 17th, Belgian vegan organisation BE Vegan organised and evening with Canadian photographer Jo-Anne McArthur. In the vegan or animal rights community, Jo-Anne McArthur is well known for her work on the project We Animals, which resulted in a book with the same title. We Animals is a series of portraits of animals in the human environment: animals used for food production, clothing, experiments and companionship. We Animals is not just meant to be a series of portraits, there’s also a moral message. Taken from the We Animals website: We Animals aims to break down the barriers that humans have built which allow us to treat non-human animals as objects and not as beings with moral significance. The objective is to photograph our interactions with animals in such a way that the viewer finds new significance in these ordinary, often unnoticed situations of use, abuse and sharing of spaces. The photos are meant to make us question what is normal, and show it from the perspective of the animal. Some of her photos were also featured in the exhibit ‘Het …
Two weeks ago, September 5 2015, there was festival on the site of DOK (former harbour grounds) in Ghent. Fair festival is announced as “the place where you can find honest and green products“. It is not a vegan festival like the one we went to a couple of weeks prior in Ghent (see our review here), but since it was with free entrance and there was a vegan BBQ at noon (for subscribers only, 16€, made by restaurant Avalon), we decided to go take a look! We arrived at about noon, and after taking a quick first look at the stalls, we went to the BBQ. This was only for people who had subscribed and paid beforehand: 16€pp. The food was very nice, but we were a little bit underwhelmed. There were plenty of vegetables and things like potato salad and rice, but hardly any real ‘barbecued’ things. There was a sate with chunks of seitan, bbqed mushroom, grilled corn and marinated tofu, but even these didn’t really taste barbecued (maybe they didn’t get the time to really …
Yesterday BE Vegan hosted Belgium’s first* vegan festival in Gentbrugge. Ghentbrugge is near the city of Ghent, about 40km from Bruges, so it was only about a half hour drive for us. We decided to go early. Partly because the weather forecast warned for possible thunderstorms in the late afternoon. Also because the inscriptions on the FB event led to suggest there was going to be a huge turnout (more than 4000 people). So we wanted to avoid the ‘big crowd’ and we arrived a little bit before noon. The festival was mainly inside one of the halls of KERKGent. Inside the hall were stalls of organisations like Bite Back, Animal Rights and host organisation BE Vegan, and also several shops selling mainly shoes, books and food. In one shielded corner of the hall were some seatings for the scheduled talks (about vegan activism, vegan bussinesses etc). The big foodstalls were outside and next to that was a tent where the food demos took place. Although we were there early, the queues for the main foodstalls outside were getting longer rapidly. We …
Growing up along the Belgian coast, I remember Winter beach walks and finding all sorts of stuff washed ashore. From ropes to driftwood, large barrels to plastic bottles. I didn’t know there are people who actually have a full time hobby collecting these items: beach combers. In Dutch they are called ‘strandjutters’ or ‘jutters’, hence the name of the museum on Texel: Juttersmuseum. It is said to be the largest collection of material collected through beach combing (jutten), with items found on the beaches of Texel over 75 years. Several beach combers donated their individual collection to the museum. If you think the only thing you would find at the Juttersmuseum are plastic bottles or boat ropes, think again. Just about everything has been found on the beaches of Texel: from TV’s to shoes, from helmets to bicycles, cars, inflatable dolls, bottles, children’s toys and even drugs. You name, it’s there. The barracks are literally packed from floor to ceiling and even the sheds themselves are (mainly) made from material found on the beaches. Some of the stuff is ‘accidentally’ lost into the ocean (washed overboard …
Anyone who’s going from the station in Bruges to ‘t Zand in the coming week cannot miss this. There are about a dozen big bords with a photo on each side of a ‘forgotten’ animal in the food industry, with next to each photo a description of the fate of the animal. The photo exhibit is originally made by the Dutch organisations Varkens in Nood (Pigs in distress) and Dier en Recht (Animal & Law) and we already saw it in Amsterdam in 2013 (see our impression on our Dutch blog here). At that point, we wrote ‘Would this be possible on the Burg in Bruges or next to the Saint-Baafscathedral in Ghent?’. And now the exhibition is actually in Belgium, and in Bruges even! Fantastic! 🙂 The exhibit uses the same images as the ones that were used in the Netherlands, but the texts are adapted to the Belgian context. The Forgotten Animal is brought to Bruges by a cooperation of different organisations*, and can be seen for a week in the Albertpark.