Anyone who knows me understands my obsession with pizza. I could eat it all day everyday and not get bored. Ask the fellow inhabitants of 319 Euclid how much pizza I would consume if left to my own devices. There was delivery, there was Dijorno, there was flatbread pizza and pizza bagels and even the occasional spaghetti pizza (where I poured cheese and pepperoni over spaghetti so it would taste more like pizza) and on days where I needed a change, there were calzones. I don’t pretend this behavior is normal or healthy but I’m just saying that adding tomato sauce and cheese to ANYTHING makes it better; eggs, bread, crackers, salad, soup, anything. This background is needed to understand the seriousness of the situation presented below.
Since we have come to town there have been some definite adjustments to what the shops and restaurants carry in an attempt to attract the Muzungu’s business. We take our lunch at one of two local restaurants most days which caused some of the other local businesses to change their menus to get in on the action. The most recent example was a shop in Mu mujyi (town center) near our center starting to make crepes. Obviously Crepe lady immediately became our new best friend because crepes are awesome and anything new and different is immediately better. On Sunday we went into crepe lady’s and she greeted us with some amazing news, on Monday she would start making pizza. Now we should have been skeptical but the news was so good we just couldn’t resist getting excited. After hugging her profusely we promised that we would all be back Monday for some pizza. Chipati, similar to Indian Naan, is a staple here in Rwanda and crepe lady sells that also so our logical assumption was that she was going to put sauce and cheese on that and cook it. Which would have been fine, and quite frankly absolutely amazing.
Come Monday 20 trainees crammed into the small back room of the crepe shop and waited the typical 45 minutes of trying to accomplish anything in Rwanda (despite the fact that we had told her what time we would be there and that we only get an hour for lunch). After much anticipation the pizzas came out and the dissapointment set in. The pizzas were about the size of bagel bites and cost 300 RWFs each (yes I know that 300 francs is 50 cents American but it’s a lot out of our budget to waste). Once they were consumed the pizzas did , in fact, taste vaguely reminiscent of the type of pizza you would find at a 711 somewhere on the Jersey Turnpike. One volunteer put it perfectly, “If I was drunk this would taste like Pizza.”
Reasonably, I should have been prepared for this outcome, but I will never forgive crepe lady for getting my hopes up and certainly will not be frequenting her shop again. Even in Kigali what they sell at the best pizza restaurants is a sad and overly healthy imitation of my favorite food. There is never enough sauce (and I say that about American pizza sometimes so you can imagine the sauce is really lacking), the pies are small, and the bills are large. So I have to decided to forgo any further attempts to find a substitute here for my beloved pizza. Until I get to site and decide to attempt to make it myself, which lets face it will still probably be disappointing, I’ll just have to live without. Mark your calendars friends, family, and Papa Johns alike when I return to America all bets are off I will be pizza crazed and picky.
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