Living for Disco

We sit in the new swanky pizza restaurant, sipping our cocktails. This is our recently established Saturday afternoon ritual, brought about so that we can sit in the sun with fancy drinks in martini glasses, saying “I never imagined that being a VSO volunteer would be like this” and then trying to get a better look at the waiter’s bum.

We decided that on this occasion, the thing that would make our lives complete would be a dish of olives, which we could nibble delicately while sipping our cocktails and looking like film stars (albeit film stars with eyebrows like Julia Roberts circa 1988, a wardrobe from Mr Price, and filthy 8 month old plastic flipflops).

“Excuse me,” we said. “Could we please have a dish of olives?”

“?” said the waiter’s face.

“Olives? Do you have olives?”

“Yeeees,” said the waiter, uncertainly, looking at us as if we were dangerous criminals recently escaped from straitjacketed incarceration.

“May we have some please?”

“Yeeees,” said the waiter, backing away.

Now, it isn’t unsual here to be able to get a little bowl of olives to snack on. This isn’t beyond the realms of the reasonable. We could not understand why he seemed so thoroughly discombobulated, especially as this restaurant is relatively posh.

The waiter returned and laid the plate down in front of us. On it, staring gently at us, lay two olives, and a toothpick each.

We thought it best not to ask for any more.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 8:40 am and is filed under Under African Skies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.