We miss good food.
In fact, every meal is met with a chorus of sighs and ticking off a list of what we are going to eat when we get back.
I know, we're in Europe. The motherland of all things tasty and delightful. You would think with that reputation that the cafeteria here would cook edible food. Instead it has been an all out war between students and staff to procure edible food and consume as much as we can because we don't know when there will be another identifiable meal.
We get a lot of food fried, cooked in grease and slapped onto plates. I feel like McDonald's would be healthier. Yes, McDonald's.
I thought maybe they were stereotyping American's, but many nations are represented here and even the other students are turning away in disgust.
They fry zucchini! Why would you fry something that is better eaten raw? Isn't it less effort? Also, what exactly is that meat? Is it steak? Pork? Blackened fish? We never do know..
Your safest bet is pork. Not one meal has gone by that pork has not been a main staple of. It's in the pasta salad, soup, sliced for breakfast, made into sausage, on pizza, in paella. Mom, if you cook one pig when I set foot on American soil I will never eat at home again.
A typical meal for the day consists of a stale piece of bread with jelly for breakfast, a piece of ham and a piece of cheese dipped in frying batter and put on a plate for lunch (yes.. I'm serious), and a piece of pork with more fat than meat fried in oil and paired with fried zucchini. I don't know how people eat here regularly and don't have heart attacks.
The good thing is every now and then they have great fresh fruits or a really great piece of chicken that I don't want to regurgitate. But then it's a war to get more than one measly piece from the clutches of the cafeteria ladies.
So we students have taken to a hit-and-run tactic. We take as much as we will eat and make a beeline for the table while the staff yells at us from behind the glass serving counter. They never do venture out to yell at us at the table, maybe there's an invisible force field I can't see.
Some of us use the passive aggressive technique of being ignorant. "Lo siento, no entiendo," we say as we walk away with our food. This is a war long in coming though. As I've mentioned before the Spanish don't like outsiders (so much so that the birth rate is dropping faster than Paris Hilton's underwear) and are an expressive culture which leads to the staff being very verbal about their dislike of us (especially the Indian/Arabic students). They don't think we know what they are saying, but we do. The moment one of us snaps back in Spanish they tend to quiet down when around students.
It's a self-perpetuating cycle we have jumped head-first into. I'm ashamed, but I'm in it. We are expected to be rude foreigners so they treat us with disrespect, in turn we are offended and disrespect them in the same manner.
I tried. For weeks I smiled and asked for second helpings of good food (making sure to compliment them on what I liked) and asked for only as much as I wanted to eat. I said please and thank you.
I was met by grunts and by being told that I should eat whatever I was served, how much I was served, and like it. Eventually I gave up, I took what I was given silently and left many plates uneaten and wasted food. I would rudely walk up and take second helpings and walk away without acknowledging that I was being chastised.
This cycle really does have to end. But until then I wonder if they understand the term "food fight" in Spain.
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