A Visit to the UJ Cafeteria and Discovering Chicken Escalope

I had heard that the University of Jordan cafeteria was a battlefield, so I waited until last week when a friend who could show me the ropes brought me along.

Dina is a Palestinian-American who grew up in L.A. Her family is orginally from Gaza, but she cannot return there, even though she holds an American passport, because the border authorities would know her as a Palestinian from their records and thus possibly not allow her to leave once she had entered. So her family is spread out between America and Jordan. She grew up speaking both Arabic and English at home, but her formal Arabic could still use some work, so she decided to come to Jordan and take a class at the UJ Language Center, where we met.

(By the way for any Cincinnati readers - she used to work at P&G in Cincy - it's a small world!)

In any case, we went to the cafeteria for lunch after class with another classmate, Laura. The cafeteria is partway down one of the long tree-lined walkways of campus. The building is nondescript, with some beaten-up tables and orange and green plastic chairs out front. Both these and the inner hall are filled with students chatting, eating lunch, and smoking (yes - inside the cafeteria).

We walked between the tightly packed tables to a small booth in the back of the hall where we had to give in our orders and get a receipt. We could then trade in the receipt for our food. Except, it seemed to me that it would be impossible to get to the two cashiers, who were completely surrounded by a pushing and shoving crowd thrusting money in their faces. Each cashier would take hold of a handful of money, look at the person, listen to the order, and then return receipt and change. There was not even a pretense of a line; it was all a matter of who could shove to the front and get the money in the hand of the cashier. I saw some people waiting the whole time that I was standing there, while others arrived and immediately found a strategic spot, and so were quickly able to get their receipts and leave.

The food is basic; sandwiches, pizza, and the like. It is also extremely inexpensive (I found out that students cannot bring outside food into campus as part of the university food service contract to keep the prices low). A sandwich is about 80 cents, a bottle of water is about 25 cents, and two pieces of pizza are about 60 cents.

After you've obtained your receipt from the cashier comes the fun part - you have to push into a crowd about four times as large as the first one in order to get the food attendant to take your receipt, after which he'll give you what you've ordered. There are separate stations for different types of food and for drinks. The push of the crowd made me laugh when I thought about the fact that we were only trying to get some lunch. You would have thought that they were giving away new cars or something. For most people though, this is an everyday routine, and so no one was particularly high-spirited about getting to the front. (I confess that without Dina's help on subsequent trips, I've asked one of the bigger, muscular guys to help me, as my elbows just aren't sharp enough to get to the front of the crowd.)

The most popular line, by far, is the line for chicken escalope. Pronounced "eskallup," almost as if it would rhyme with "gallop," this wrap is a fried, breaded chicken patty, with ketchup, french fries, and crunchy white cabbage all wrapped up in a tortilla and heated on a grill iron. This is one of the strangest combinations of cuisines I've ever eaten, and I'd love to learn how people came up with it. But to tell you the truth, it's pretty good! I have no illusions that it's healty - unless you want to count the strings of cabbage as a serving of vegetables? - but it's certainly surprising and pretty tasty. It's not a creation of the UJ cafeteria either - now that I know what to look for, I see them all over Jordan.

The lack of line phenomenon is also not unique to the cafeteria. I've gotten used to walking right in front of other people to take a taxi, for example, (the kind of thing I imagine used to get you shot in New York). I'm not usually one to push to the front of the line, but I would go hungry and never get anywhere in Jordan if I didn't - so I'm learning.