Feeling Salty

This was a post I wrote a few weeks ago chronicling a night that I had in the banking town with some new friends. It was such a fun night, despite the salty nature of the story. It isn’t super long, but it felt like a fun piece of creative non-fiction, and I would love to try it again sometime. Anyways, enjoy!

There we were, a night on the town in Shinyanga. Going to the cool hang out spots like a club slightly on the outskirts of town. This place was called Level One, named after Level Four that was on the top of the tallest building in town and (unfortunately) was shut down early last month. The atmosphere of this place was high energy and classy with a bar and two places they were cooking food. There frequently are live musicians and DJs that come to entertain the patrons of this funky place.

There is one thing that we are here for. One mission to bring the taste of home to Tanzania. Pizza.

There were roumors, nay confirmation, that there were delicious mounds of cheezy goodness hiding at this club hidden in town. A Canadian man told us that he had the best pizza he had ever had in Tanzania at this place. Obviously our gaggle of cheese loving Americans were intrigued by this glowing recommendation, so of course that day we found ourselves sitting in chairs on the patio of Level One.

A dada came up and asked us one by one what we wanted. There was no need to ask each of us. We were all there with the same goal. As she went back and placed our order, we waited with anxious anticipation. And we waited. And waited… and waited. We checked our watches. Drank a beer or two. Checked our watches… and waited.

“I can’t wait to eat this pizza,” someone said.

“It is going to be so adequate,” I responded, knowing full well whatever we were going to eat was not anything at all comprable to New York pizza. Or probably even dominoes pizza. But it was going to be pizza. Cheesy, goopey, delicious pizza. So we waited some more.

“Should we ask them how much longer?” we all wondered aloud. A question repeated endlessly for an hour. 

“Maybe someone could just go ask?” 

“I’m sure she will come back.” 

“it couldn’t be much longer now,” a statement uttered too often to be true.

And then, after hours, they arrived. And somehow, a mystery to this day, they were all cold. Every single one of them felt like they had been pulled out of a refrigerator. But I like cold pizza and I was ravenous, so I took a bite. 

A wave of salt rushed through all of my senses so completely I almost spit it out there at the table. It was so completely inedible, yet I found myself continuing to put slice after slice into my mouth. Everyone does the same as we gag but stubbornly resolve to enjoy this absolutely horrendous monstrosity of a cheese pizza. We find some pieces are somehow more salty than the rest. We taste each others attempts at pizza and compare and rank whose was the most tolerable. No one won.

“So that was by far the worst pizza that has ever existed, right?” one of my new friends asked.

Of course we all agreed.