The Universal Language
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re in Cairo, or technically, New Giza City. We’ve always stayed in downtown Cairo in the past, and this is a completely different experience out in the suburbs. Also, our hotel room has a view of the pyramids, which makes me giggle every time I look out the window.
The Universal Language
One of Lee’s favorite jokes is that pizza is like sex: even bad pizza is pretty good. And in our lives of constant change and unpredictability, pizza is familiar and always, always available. I don’t believe we have ever been to a country where we couldn’t get at least some semblance of pizza.
We had pizza in Dusseldorf a couple of months ago, on a day when it was snowing & slushy and cold. Pizza was a) indoors, b) nearby, and c) a nice break from the potato pancakes and spaetzle of the Christmas markets.
Plus I hadn’t had pizza since we left Italy in July. It was officially a pizza emergency.
Pizza emergencies happen sometimes, like when we’re too tired to figure out what else to eat—sound familiar? They also happen when we’re craving comfort or predictability. They also happen when there’s nothing else vegetarian available (that’s a me-thing, not a Lee-thing). Sometimes pizza is just the simplest way to get a quick, inexpensive meal without too much fuss.
The best pizzas are mostly in Italy, but we had some pretty damn amazing ones in Japan, too. There’s a very competitive pizza culture in Tokyo; the pizzaolos all know each other and trained together, and a technique sprang up in this intense pizza environment that is called the salt punch. An extra fillip of salt is flung into the oven, embedding itself on the outside of the crust, brightening and deepening the flavor of each bite. The depth of pizza expertise and deliciousness in Tokyo is not so surprising, really, given the Japanese culture of excellence and perfectionism.
There are also pizza situations, which are different from pizza emergencies. One pizza situation was the $70 pie we had in Norway—it was the least-expensive (but still expensive) meal we had while we were in the country, and it wasn’t very good. There was another $70 pizza situation in India, which was NOT our idea, and was somehow even worse than the pizza in Norway—don’t ever eat pizza in India. Trust me on this—it may be available, because pizza always is, but it’s a bad idea. Stick with Indian food.
The pizzas we remember most fondly, though, are the truly unexpected ones: there’s an Italian man living in Luang Prabang, Laos—he built a wood-burning oven behind his house, and two nights a week his yard becomes ‘Secret Pizza.’ It’s a convivial gathering of locals and tourists, some who’ve been coming for years, others who just heard about it at the bar down the street. There’s also a small chain in Vietnam that serves one of my favorite pizzas anywhere. They own a buffalo dairy farm, where they make their own burrata. An entire burrata, cut open and melting over the top of a legit pizza—*chef’s kiss.*
Once on the train in Italy, we met a young woman who was going to visit her family in Verona (where we were staying). We told her we were loving the pizza we’d been eating—she asked which was our favorite. Salvatore’s, we said. Turned out that was her family’s restaurant. She invited us for lunch the next week and we had a rollicking good time, and then we went to the opera together, as one does in Italy.
I think pizza succeeds where Esperanto failed: it is the universal language.
Take care,
Lisa
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