I am taking it easy tonight, so I went to have dinner in the restaurant that’s in the lobby of my hotel, even though they didn’t have an English menu and the pictures were very small. I decoded everything that was in katakana (ポテトサラダ = potato salad, バナナチップ = banana chips, etc) and decided that the pizza was going to be the closest I could get to an identifiable (and therefore potentially vegetarian dinner).
The picture of the pizza was small, but I could see that there were vegetables on it. I thought there might be meat on it too, so I wanted to convey that I wanted the vegetables but not the meat, so I tried a few variations on words I thought might help. None of them worked, though, so I thought I’d try for a margherita pizza, which many pizza-serving places have on their menu. No dice. Okay, so how about a cheese pizza? I said “チーズピザ” (cheezu peetza) because the word for cheese is pronounced “cheezu” and the word for pizza is pronounced “peetza” – I was speaking Japanese, this couldn’t fail, right? She repeated it back to me, and I repeated it back again. I said “just cheezu peetza” and she said “ｼﾞｳｽﾄチーズピザ” (jusuto cheezu peetza)? I said yes. She went over to talk to a coworker, who nodded, and then she put my order in to the kitchen.
About 10 minutes later, I was given a delicious looking pizza, with just cheese on it. Just cheese. As in, no tomato sauce or anything else. It was basically like an open-face grilled cheese sandwich on pizza dough. They used different cheeses, though, so it was actually pretty good, quite hot, and nice and cheesy! Just…not what I had in mind.
I went to a nearby 7-11 after to pick up extra snacks. On the way, I passed an Italian restaurant. I thought, “I could have gone there” – and then I realized…if I had, I wouldn’t have had the “justo cheezu peetza” and it was actually kind of fun.