The story goes as this: In our existence as foreign faculty, we get to enjoy a couple of blessings. One of these blessings is that we get our meals served for free, three times a day, buffet style. (Though others might consider it a curse, especially those who don’t like the food being served, which – generally speaking – are a lot of people.)

Well, the thing is that during the winter break, things change quite a bit. For one, instead of three meals, we only get two meals at considerably odd hours (mid morning and late afternoon). What’s even more tricky is when evil forces try to interrupt this delicate cycle of meals. As it happened just this morning.

A blackout was the evil force that tried to meddle with our meal times. A blackout which was caused by a villain called “broken-pipe-in-the-kitchen” who had caused serious damage and a river to run through one of the big kitchens (literally). So, with the intentions of repairing the damage, other forces had set out to turn off the power in our building for a couple of hours (or did they just cut the power on the whole campus for some other maintenance issues?). Who knows exactly?

Anyhow, we were effected in such a way that the mid-morning meal was pushed back to the lunch hour, and the afternoon meal to be an early dinner. ‘Nothing wrong with that’, I thought. But as I was walking into the dining hall for lunch today, I realized something was wrong. Seriously wrong. The faces of my dear colleagues told that all too clearly. Their comments as well.

And when I looked at the food that had been served, I knew exactly why. Instead of nice lunch choices, it was just the same ol’ breakfast items we’re being served every mid-morning. Now, you see, here’s the punch. Me, being from Germany, I generally consider the American breakfast items more like lunch (because we’d never serve waffles, fried potatoes and the likes for breakfast). But my dear American colleagues weren’t pleased at all, and turned up their noses.

But I, for once, considered myself blessed as far as meals go. For once I had a decent German style lunch!