Here's one, and I think I touched on it before, but here it is again:
I got to the UK in October, and my wife joined me about three weeks later, in November. By mid-December, we bought a new car (Volvo) through Tourist-Diplomat Sales and before we knew it, just over a month later, we were on our first trip from England to another country, Sweden, to pick up our car at the factory.
They put us up at a nice downtown hotel in Gothenburg, and it was a little disorienting, getting from the North Sea ferry port to the right bus for our hotel, and it was dark, and rainy, and cold, and by the time we got there and got settled in, we were starving, so to make things easy, we decided to eat at the hotel restaurant, which looked very posh to us.
We were seated, it was very close to Christmas, and there were decorations, but very understated, which made it seem even more elegant to us.
To Americans who'd never been anywhere near anything Scandinavian before, the menu was a complete mystery, with all those ø things in every other word, we were lost. The waitress knew just the most basic English, and she pointed to one thing and said "beef," and another and said "duck," or whatever, and to keep it safe we ordered the beef, and we'd watch her deliver festive-looking bottles of beer to another table, so we ordered those.
Did I mention we were starving? We had that kind of hunger where you're sort of biting your nails and constantly looking over at the kitchen doors, ready to eat the tablecloth if need be.
The doors swung open...two plates...is that ours?...looks like it's heading our way...yes! YES!!! GET IN MY BELLY!!!
She sat down the plates, and were each greeted with a piece of meat no larger than a single scallop, and about half as thick. Seriously, this was a cracker-topper at best.
Not only that, but arranged at equal intervals around the meat...three carrot halves, only these carrots, before they were halved, were no bigger around than a standard pencil. A silky brown sauce was dribbled around it all.
It was classy, artistic even, but more than anything, it was...
small.
Seriously, my fork weighed more than the beef. Maybe this is some kind of unspoken appetizer that everyone gets? We're in Europe, after all, and maybe this is a European thing? Surely this isn't our entire meal? Is it?
It was.
We did manage to also get a kind of plum tart thingy, which was also laughably small, but all combined, both meals together, didn't even come close to equaling a typical meal for one of us, let alone both.
We ended up going back up to the room and eating the Toblerone that was there, as well as some crackers that we'd stuffed in our pockets from the ferry ride over.
The next night...we took no chances on going hungry, we went to Pizza Hut!
