"Please sir, may I have some more?"

Hello and good day boys and girls, the topic of today's post is the dining hall- sponsored by Oliver; the play that keeps on giving.

Let's start off by providing a little background. We pay 11 Euro (around $13.5) for each dinner here, and a few more for breakfast. Our meal plans, which are compulsory, are for breakfast and dinner Monday through Friday. Lunch we do on our own because we're usually at school then. Since we arrived here two weeks ago, the food quality has been poor at best. It has made the Northwestern dining halls look like paradise. There are rules here.

We choose two items from the following: a bowl of applesauce, a bowl of fruit cocktail from a can, an apple, an orange, a banana, and a square of cheese the size of a credit card. Then we get a main dish and we can opt for the vegetarian option, which last night was fried cheese. Sometimes there is a dessert to pick from as well. At the end of the line, if you already picked two things from the beginning, you can only pick one more thing, which is either a bowl of lettuce, a bowl of shredded cabbage, a bowl of diced tomatoes, a bowl of sliced cucumber, or a bowl of what looks like cous cous and chopped sausage. Or, if you only picked one item from the beginning of the line, you may pick two from the end.

Except that, for the past two weeks the rule was that you can have two from the start of the line, and two from the end, plus a dessert. Dinner is between 7:00 and 7:30 pm, and at 7:30 you must turn in your tray or the dining hall workers get angry. This is what happened yesterday:

I arrived downstairs in the dining hall at 6:50, and there were already 23 people in front of me, per usual. People wait downstairs way before 7:00 because they usually run out of food. (Tuesday night they served chicken and the vegetarian option was fish- a whole fish with the head and tail still on- so lots of people chose chicken instead. They ran out of chicken pretty quickly, so they served french fries, of course. Clearly, potatoes are the perfect alternative to chicken.) They opened the doors early- at 6:54- which is very, very unusual. I was excited! Maybe the phone calls from all the angry mothers really were paying off!

As I waited for my turn to get food, I looked at the night's meal. It looked alright. The desserts looked delicious, the salad/diced food at the end looked alright. I devised my plan, I would get one dessert, two fruits, the vegetarian main dish of rice, sauce, and fried cheese (the alternative was rice with chili con carne), then get the bowl of lettuce and the bowl of chopped tomatoes and make a legit salad.

First, I grabbed the desert option that looked the best; an apple tart thing the size of two credit cards. Then, I grabbed an orange and an apple. The North African woman behind the counter said something angrily in French and then said "DEUX!!" But, I had picked two! I wasn't understanding the problem, and before I knew it she had snatched the orange off of my tray and put it back in the fruit basket.

Alarmed, I continued on down the line. Another angry North African woman went to serve me the beef without even asking which one I preferred, so I quickly pointed to the beef and said "no!" She put the vegetarian option on my plate and handed it to me while arguing with the grad student who works here. Next, I picked up the bowl of lettuce and the bowl of chopped tomatoes. This time it was the North African man who was yelling at me..in french.

Again, I had picked too many things. The grad student, Luc, was standing right there. I asked him what the deal was, and he said he didn't know but it was best not to argue because they get really angry. "I know.." I replied. I sadly put the tomatoes back and unhappily took my seat (and I don't even like tomatoes, I just wanted to salvage this bowl of lettuce!).

Please sir, may I have some more?