When you are travelling, things are not always as you expect them to be. In Cape Town, the man leaning on a shiny taxi while offering you an incredible rate to your destination may, once you take his offer, lead you to a van full of people and awful smells. You may find the service at a restaurant in Australia to be poor because your waiter has not checked in on you, while he may think it rude to interrupt your conversation to ask, “How is the food?” Google maps might say that the Taj Mahal is two hours from New Delhi, but you may find that with traffic full of trucks, overloaded motorcycles and auto rickshaws, bikes, goats, elephants and cows, it actually takes you five hours and you risk arriving after it closes. In a nice place in Bombay, you may excuse yourself to visit the powder room, subconsciously expecting an American Standard toilet with toilet paper--only to find a hole in the ground with a hose nearby with which to wash up.
These are some of the things that make travel so exhilarating, perspective-building, and humbling.
But when you want your Friday night pizza, you do not want nor expect exhilarating, perspective-building, or humbling. You just want and expect pizza. P-I-Z-Z-A, pizza. With dough, sauce, cheese, and maybe toppings. Cooked and warmed. Hopefully delicious.
When you are travelling, however, and things are not always as you expect them to be, your "hopefully delicious" pizza might turn out to be a dud.
We arrived in Cape Town, South Africa, for a quick slumber at an airport hotel before our last leg to Maputo, Mozambique. It was Saturday evening and after consuming too many meals consisting of airplane food--the flight from Atlanta to Cape Town alone is over 17 hours long-- we were hungry for something satisfying. (You may now be asking yourself, does this mean that the Friday night pizza tradition was not honored? Sadly, that is correct. The airline we flew, which will go unnamed, did not honor our Friday night tradition.) We scanned the lobby pamphlets for pizza parlors and stepped out the door to see if any might be in sight. We saw only a gas station.
Anxious to keep tradition alive and satiate our hunger, we asked the tall, blond receptionist where to find some good pizza. In her thick Afrikaans accent, she replied, “
Panarotti’s es guuud.” She pointed to the phone number, and we noticed that it said it delivered! This was the golden ticket, for we were also extremely tired.
First, we needed to decide what to get. We thought a medium pizza would be sufficient. No toppings necessary tonight. The cost next to the description was in South African Rand, so we did some quick calculations and realized that this was going to be a bit expensive. Oh well.
The next step was to call to order our pizza. We could not find a room telephone, so we walked back down to the receptionist, who told us to use the pay phone in the hallway near our room. We found the phone. It took only coins. Obviously in Rand.
Having just arrived in the country, we had taken out money just to pay the taxi driver and eat dinner. He, in turn, gave us change in bills. Therefore, we did not have any coins. Back to the reception desk we went. When they couldn’t help us, we decided to try the gas station next door.
We picked up a soda, just to ensure we could receive change. Behind bullet-proof glass, the cashier processed our purchase and dumped the change into a tray, which appeared on our side of the glass. Should we feel nervous? The tray had coins, so we were mostly feeling thankful.
Back to the hallway phone. Payphones are often a challenge in foreign countries, and this one was no exception. On the third try, someone from Panarotti’s picked up. We ordered our delivery pizza. And crossed our fingers that it would arrive.
It did. We were famished and excited to eat.
But like we said, when you are travelling, things are often not what you expect them to be. And after all that trouble to fill our stomachs and keep tradition alive, it was the WORST pizza we had ever tasted. Laying eyes on it, it looked like a disappointment. Like it was made with leftovers. And it was tiny--definitely not big enough for two large appetites. And it tasted as disappointing as it looked. We devoured it with starving eyes.
Left hungry and both unsatisfied and dissatisfied, we supplemented our disappointing meal with items from the arsenal of snacks we keep with us on long trips. We then fell asleep, dreaming of delicious pizza and finally seeing family in Maputo.
When travelling, you have to take the good with the bad. Later on that trip, we would see some of the most beautiful sights on Earth—Victoria Falls, Cape of Good Hope, and Table Mountain. Incredible experiences make the bad experiences worthwhile. And you come to appreciate what you perceive as normal, and sometimes take for granted, at home.
But really, who wants to learn lessons of appreciation from pizza? We just want to eat it and for it to be delicious.
