Why is there egg on my pizza?

Being the Americans that we are, it took us less than two weeks to be craving pizza.  Luckily we saw a place down the road that looked promising.  Pizza Pal sounded like it would have all the greasy American pizza we could ever want.

When we got to the restaurant we saw that we were not eating at Pizza Pal, as we had thought, but Pizza Paï, and this was definitely not an American pizza place.

I saw things on that menu that I couldn’t believe.  Not being overly confident in my vocabulary, I double-checked with our Belgian friend.  Yep, they really were putting egg on the pizza.  Right in the center.  And no pepperoni.  Anywhere.

(For a picky eater, studying abroad can sometimes be a traumatic experience.  As much as I want to have an open mind, I just can’t have an open stomach.  No thank you, olive bread, I’ll just let the French people eat you.)

As we were all deciding what we wanted, we began to mentally create our list of how many and what kind of pizzas we would need for the table.  Upon hearing this, our Belgian friend looked at us like we were crazy.

“Why would you want more than one pizza?” she asked.

“There are six of us!  You expect us to share one pizza?!” my brain screamed before she finished her statement.  Now, I know French people don’t eat like Americans do but come on!  This is just ridiculous.  I’d be getting approximately three-quarters of a slice of pizza if we only ordered one pizza!

“The pizza is only for one person.  It’s only this big,” she said as she drew an imaginary circle the size of an ordinary plate.

I can’t even begin to describe how many times our Belgian friend has come to our rescue.  Today she saved us from the inevitable disappointment of a pizza shortage, last week it was from steak cooked rare, and earlier still it was from a crazy man telling us about taxes.

After we ordered six individual-sized pizzas, some of our table decided to venture to the salad bar.  It’s not really called that here but I’m still going to call it that because it’s the only thing I would have eaten from it.  In addition to some bread and various pasta-type side dishes, the salad bar also had some type of ham spread (which we found out too late that you’re supposed to put ON the bread instead of eating it by itself). 

As the girls pushed around the food on their plates, not really wanting to finish any of it, we began wondering why our pizza was taking so long.  We had been there for almost an hour and I can’t imagine a pizza could take that long to cook, even with an egg on it.  Now I know why they include the tip in the bill at France: their service is so slow.  

Well it turns out they don't have bad service.  They were waiting for us to finish our salads.  In France, they don’t want you to feel rushed by piling all your food in front of you at once.  So, as long as we were playing with our food out of boredom, the waitress would not give us our pizza.  Lesson learned...although I still wonder if my parents secretly arranged this experience so I would FINALLY stop playing with my food.