The pizza place... The Polish pizza place...
It was in basement, so that meant six steps down from street level, and into a narrow doorway just to get in...
Imagine, then, juggling a large pizza in a box, how hard it was to get out, again...
It was a rectangular room, the kitchen and service counter at one end, and the rest of the space filled with diner style tables and bench seats jutting out from the walls.
The walls... They were covered with neon strips, tubes of different shapes, sizes and colours, and had fish tanks set into them.
You can always tell the tone of a restaurant by the variety of fish they keep - in this instance, they were piranha, ha ha...
It gets better... the ahem, background music was German Punk... Loud, of course, ha ha...
The fun, I must admit, began with ordering...
He didn't speak English, and I didn't speak Polish...
This can only get awkward... ha ha...
Using the "Handy phrases for travellers" chapter in my well thumbed Lonely Planet guide book, I launched into an attempt to order a pizza...
I might as well have been ordering spare parts for the Apollo moon landing...
It was, to say the least, excruciating... ha ha...
The book kept being passed backwards and forwards across the counter as we struggled to cobble together even the most simple of sentences... ha ha...
We did well to establish that I wanted a large pizza, but the subject of toppings floored us both...
So I ended up buying a "Fruit salad" pizza from the sign above the counter.
It sounded good at the time, ha ha...
I can't tell you the entire range of toppings, but I do recall there were tinned half apricots, and kiwi fruit slices featured large on it, too, ha ha...
And it wasn't at all bad...
I've eaten some strange pizzas over the years, and often enough suffered the queasy consequences the next day, but the fruit salad pizza was great.
And it probably staved off scurvy for another day, such is the varied and variable diet of the wandering backpacker, ha ha.
🙂
Dogs...the isolation boredom becomes desperation.
