It's a Green House

In this post I talked about our recent trip around Europe and there are some restaurant tips for the cities we visited. I also have some general tips on how to have a nice holiday, and not live off of chips: Plan ahead. I researched each city we were visiting and saved web pages as PDF's in my phone (in case we didn't have wifi access) with details of vegan friendly places. Sites like Happy Cow and TripAdvisor list vegetarian and vegan restaurants. Or just a google search will find you plenty of sites.  You can also download areas of google maps to use offline to take with you, and can search for addresses in it as usual so this can come in handy with finding restaurants from the PDF's. If you can't plan ahead that much, i.e. if you don't know where you will be staying, don't wait until you are hungry to try to find somewhere to eat. We tend to keep an eye out while walking around sightseeing in the day for places to go for dinner, look at menus outside ...

I went on my first few trips this year since I went vegan, and I didn't end up just eating chips! The first were short breaks to London and Dublin. There was plenty of choice and being English speaking places I could ask for what I needed, and I knew the chain restaurants I could go to if I had to. Then the big one, we drove around Europe for 2 weeks. Hm, that's a lot of different languages, cities, countries and cuisines. Didn't pick an easy one to start with! There is always chips, and I knew I could just go and buy some fruit etc if I really struggled, but it would be nice not to have to. As it turns out the only time I had to just have a plate of chips was in a random service station in the middle of nowhere in Germany so I think I did quite well. Anyone visiting Brugge, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Salzburg, Innsbruck, Switzerland or Luxembourg...here's what I found! Click on restaurant names for links to their websites. We stayed in most places 2 ni...

Recently I started substituting all of our cosmetic and cleaning products to cruelty free versions. I don't know why some animal tested products had found their way back in but they had. Maybe I just got lazy over the years or to be honest I think I just stopped checking products after a while as I thought I knew who tested and who didn't. Also AVON started testing on animals again. Which screwed up my whole system as ALL of my cosmetics were from them!! So I had to restart the whole process of finding cruelty free cosmetics, and I thought I might as well redo the cleaning products while I was at it. Seriously AVON wtf, like wt actual f. Anyway... It is so much easier nowadays as you can check in store on your phone if a company tests on animals (when I went veggie in the olden days it was if in doubt don't buy it, go home and look it up or ring them on the landline and ask...then go back and buy it if it was ok). I also use facebook groups and this website or thi...