eat the damn fish

I’m somewhat used to food recommendations: You simply must try the goat-cheese-&-olive-stuffed chicken breast! Or, more likely given my socioeconomic class: You simply must try the Chicken Grilled Stuft Burrito Extra Value Meal!

In Uganda food recommendations are much less commonly made than back home, mainly because there’s never the guarantee a restaurant will actually be stocked with arbitrary things like food, water, waiters or other such predictable lavishes so very standard in America. You learn to ask “Is there food?” the moment you sit down, a question that’s usually met with a thoughtful expression, followed by a furrowed brow, followed by your waiter disappearing for ten to twelve minutes, followed by the disappointing news that “Food is not there. But I can offer you a selection of room temperature beers and an arrangement of three to two Ugandan pop songs played on repeat at a volume guaranteed incompatible with human conversation. If you’d like to further reduce your conversation risk, as you’re still in danger of being able to lip-read your dining companion, we can pair tonight’s pop medley with the deafening dialogue and distracting images of a homemade Nigerian film.”

I recently had the opportunity to stay in an upscale lodge in Queen Elizabeth National Park, the sort of mythical place I’ve heard about where food is always “there”, where beer is served at a temperature colder than my mouth and where one bottle of water costs about the same as my weekly food budget. For the average Peace Corps volunteer, the word ‘upscale’ can be used loosely to mean a variety of things: The mosquito net was virtually hole-free! The rats in the ceiling were really quiet! I was easily able to incorporate the 5 a.m. call to prayer into my dream! Yes, I did happen to be dreaming about teaching sign-language to gorillas inside a Muslim mosque. What about it?

Call me a snob but I try to reserve the word ‘upscale’ for the rare occasions when the toilet is actually connected to the hotel room, toilet paper or not. That is, that was my definition of upscale until my weekend at the lodge, a charming world where wake-up calls involve hippos splashing outside your window and honest-to-goodness brewed coffee brought directly to your door, a world with the sort of water pressure you long ago forgot existed, a world with a convenient turn down service that saves you the overwhelming trouble of removing decorative pillow after decorative pillow; a world where decorative pillows actually exist.

My second morning at the lodge a man brought tea to my door instead of coffee. I was pissed.

Rewind just one week and I’m back in Queen Elizabeth National Park with my sister, this time in a hotel with no electricity, an inadvertent flush-to-activate, Bellagio-style fountain in the bathroom caused by a broken toilet pipe, an interactive bedspread comprised of hundreds of ants and a single menu option of: fish. To be fair, we were told we simply must try the fish; we just didn’t realize we actually…MUST try the fish. Ever tried eating an entire whole tilapia in the dark? How I would have killed to wash down my fish bones with an overpriced bottle of water or mistaken cup of tea.