Grammar and Tones

My company has a fantastic perk: twice a year the company rents a big villa in Sommer nice place, in summer somewhere warm and sunny, in somewhere you can ski. Everyone in the whole company can then go there for a week to “work” remotely, although “team building” at the pool equally counts at work.

My team and I just came back from Italy. The last night we had pizza: we ordered 5 huge pizzas with various toppings and everyone ate whatever they wanted. Our Italian colleague made sure that we had all sorts of toppings, except one: pineapple. The Italian aversion to pineapples is infamous. I find this rather surprising, since I always thought that pizza was a dish that you could make by just putting whatever you happened to have left in your fridge on it. But the Italian view seems to be: there’s nothing worse than pineapple on a pizza.

It turns out they are wrong. And how wrong they are! I’m not gonna get into the discussion about whether pineapple on a pizza is a good idea or not. I’m not qualified to decide that (for me there’s only one pizza and that’s salami), and I don’t want to make enemies.

But I can tell absolutely for sure that there are worse things on a pizza than pineapple. If you don’t belief it, I dare you to go to a pizza restaurant, even a global chain pizza restaurant like Pizza Hut or Papa Johns, in China. If you get a pizza with potatoes as the main topping, then you won the lucky draw: it’s just incredible bland and flavourless – basically like potato wedges with bread. But at least it’s not disgusting. If you have to take in some nutrients to live, potato pizza is gonna do the job. Then just order a bowl of rice with it (as most people will do), and you’ll definitely survive.

But then it gets worse: durian pizza is a particularly digusting one. Durian itself is a highly contentious fruit, mostly for its smell, although I personally quite like the fresh version. But baked durian on a pizza is just really not a good idea of you are not a fan of throwing up, and the fact that they’d down it in ketchup and mayonnaise really doesn’t make it any easier to swallow.

And it doesn’t stop there. My personal nightmare was popcorn pizza: all the vegetable and cheesy toppings you could reasonably expect to find on a pizza combined with popcorn and chocolate sauce. And ketchup and mayonnaise! My general philosophy has always been: “You should try everything once, you just don’t have to eat it a second time.”

This one, I refused to try! It is obvious that this is gonna be horrible. I have tried chicken feet, I have tried half-bred eggs, I have tried pig brain, and I have tried my fair share of disgusting varieties of Chinese pizza. I don’t need to try yet another disgusting variety to find even more confirmation that some ingredients should simply not be put on a pizza.

Friday tradition

The part of Beijing where we lived was not very international, so it wasn’t easy to get Western food there. And that’s totally ok, because a lot of Chinese food, both home-cooked and eaten out, is very nice and healthy. Once a week, however, I did appreciate some Western food, mostly because I never really felt full after a Chinese meal – which is ironic, because at the same time I never really managed to eat up my bowl of rice.

Hence we soon developed the tradition of pizza Fridays. Pizza Express would deliver (rather mediocre) pizzas to our place and they did have a pepperoni pizza. There was also a (mediocre) Pizza Hut in the local shopping centre, where we could go on a Friday, especially when we had friends around.

I always ordered a pepperoni pizza. If I ever tried anything else I, would regret it for the whole week to come. The pepperoni pizza was not very good, it was so cheesy and oily that I sometimes couldn’t even finish it, and the cheese was most definitely not actual real cheese.

I don’t really know how much my wife was into mediocre pizza, but I will be forever grateful to her for the passion and enthusiasm with which she used to shout out “It’s pizza Friday! Which pizza do you want?”, to which I’d immediately shout back “pepperoni pizza!”. Every. Single. Time. She gave me the feeling that it was just a wonderful thing to eat a mediocre pizza together on Fridays, rather than her foreign husband craving his home food.

A main and two sides

German meals usually consist of three parts: a piece of meat, some vegetables or salad, and potatoes. Generally the smaller the portion of vegetables, and the bigger the piece of meat, the better. Sometimes the side dish might consist of a single salad leave as a decoration, but it has to be there. The potatoes can be boiled, roasted, smashed or fried – there are a hundred different ways to eat potatoes in Germany.

When Chinese people eat together, there will usually be a number of different dishes put in the middle of the table, so that everyone can try a little bit of a whole lot of different things. The Chinese invented the typical round rotating tables to facilitate this.

There is a Chinese joke. It goes like this: three foreigners walk into a restaurant. They order three random dishes since they can’t read the menu. When the dishes arrive, the first foreigner eats the duck, the second foreigner eats the cabbage, and the third foreigner eats the rice. It makes fun of the fact that in many Western countries, it is not common to share the food, but everyone eats their own dish.

I never wanted to be the stupid foreigner from the joke. Whenever we went out, I dutifully ate a little bit of all the dishes we ordered, and tried my best to avoid the dishes that I knew would be horrendous. This was often easier said than done. I remember once, a friend of the family invited us for a very very nice and generous meal, with a lot of amazing Chinese delicacies, but the highlight of the dinner was sea cucumber, and because sea cucumber is considered such an exquisite and precious delicacy, each of us got served one directly onto our plates. I would say sea cucumber is on the disgustingess scale somewhere between chicken feet and popcorn pizza, but since everyone could see it lying on my plate, I desperately tried to somehow bury it under a pile of rice and then pretended that had all of a sudden realised that I actually wasn’t all that hungry after all.

Chinese also share at Pizza Hut. But they don’t go to Pizza Hut for pizza. They go for sinicised Western food. A typical order at Pizza Hut for a group of, say, five would be: one small pizza, a portion of chicken wings, a very-well-done steak with Hoi Sin sauce, a Chinese Leave dish, and a big bowl of rice.

Then, everybody eats a little bit of everything. In the end, everybody had at most a tiny little piece of pizza.

I boycotted this practise! Do what you want, but I’m gonna order a pepperoni pizza just for myself! I’ll be the stupid foreigner that you joke about. But on Pizza Fridays, I want to be full, I want to eat as much of my favourite dish as I want, and I want nothing with my pizza that doesn’t belong with a pizza, neither on top of it nor next to it, nor anywhere near my plate. Pineapple, durian and chicken wings have to wait till Saturday…