Mr. Pizza

Today is a banner day for us. We had pizza for lunch. Real pizza.

You can see in the photo that D has a kind of manic look on his face. This is because after a month of tasty but unfamiliar food, we lucked into a Englishman-owned pizza joint called Mr. Pizza that is about 10 minutes from our house in a village called JinDing. This place serves true Western-style food.*

D's pizza had cheese, pepperoni, beef, and bacon. Mine had cheese, mushrooms, and chilies. It was thin crust pizza -- like those stone-grilled pizzas that were really popular in the states a few years back. We also had Italian olives, French bread with olive oil for dipping, and marinated sun-dried tomatoes with roasted garlic.

And on the right-hand side of the photo, you can see D's coke -- what you can't see is the ice in the coke. That's right -- ice! What a treat!

This menu sounds mundane to all of you, I'm sure. But it was heaven on a plate for us. We have been enjoying our culinary adventures here, but I wasn't prepared for how happy I was to eat something as "boring" as pizza.

* Self-proclaimed Western-style restaurants here usually don't serve what we consider to be Western food. Sometimes they just serve other types of Asian food. In this case, "Western" means non-Chinese (but could mean Japanese, Thai, etc.). Sometimes they serve Western food, like sandwiches, but they're really weird -- not at all what you'd find in North America or even, I suspect, most of Europe. Sometimes a Western restaurant will have a typical Chinese-mix menu, but will bring you a fork instead of chopsticks if they perceive you as non-Chinese. So, the only thing Western about it is that it has international cutlery. For all of these reasons, we inwardly groan when a Chinese person -- who is trying to be helpful -- recommends a restaurant to us that serves "Western" food. We don't entirely hate Western-style restaurants like this -- there is something kind of entertaining about seeing their "take" on North American/European food and watching Chinese people try to eat whole sandwiches with chopsticks.