Food Adventures

One of the things about living in new countries is that each task can become an adventure. Unfamiliar things are new, and even things you thought were familiar suddenly take on a local flavor.

Take my recent experience with Pizza Hut. As most people know, Pizza Hut is an American pizza chain which peddles pizza and its accompanying foods-- pasta, breadsticks, chicken wings, salad, etc.

A few weeks ago, my coworker Sally and I were hungry, and didn't want to experience the campus catering lunch that day, so we decided to order pizza and have it delivered. As I had run out of vegetables at home, and wasn't going to go to the store until the next day, I decided to order a salad to go with lunch. "Surely they sell salad", I thought to myself. Or they do lunch buffet, and could pull salad stuff off the buffet to make me something. I wasn't picky. As long as it didn't have celery. Celery is gross.

When Sally called and expressed her wish to have salad too, she had to do some explaining. 'Here we go...', I thought to myself. 'I wonder what's going to turn up?'

I've never had to wonder about salad presentation before. A salad is a salad is a salad.

And, sure enough, I got vegetables in a take-away container. Big vegetables. A true salad which represents the availability of vegetables here.

In the States, at least, salads are primarily composed of lettuce. Lettuce is cheap, yes? The accompanying vegetables are scant, since they cost more.

Not here, though.

Almost everything is imported to Qatar. Some things are more expensive than others. Lettuce falls under the 'expensive' category. So there were 3 (I counted them) leaves of lettuce garnishing the top.

On the other hand, there were the equivalent of two bell peppers (sliced), a whole tomato (quartered), a carrot (sliced), a cucumber (sliced), and a quarter lemon. These things fall under the 'cheap' category.



This was my "garden salad". Good value, though, for 15 riyal. The cut vegetables alone probably cost 6 or 7 riyal altogether.