Leftovers anyone?

As a newbie in Beijing, the best way to meet people is to go to every single social event that you get invited to. You never know, you might meet someone vaguely interesting! Last Sunday I failed to make it to the 9am service so instead went to the 11am service. Strangely enough the crowd is much younger at the 11am service. Can't think why?

I happened to sit next to an English teacher, who was sitting behind his friend, another English teacher, who after service caught up with another English teacher. I was delighted. 6 English teachers. How exciting. Maybe we could all go for lunch and talk shop about exciting topics like 'how to make prepositions vaguely interesting'. So I invited myself to lunch.

We went to a pizza place called 'The Tube Station' near Yuanmingyuan park. We were 7 people so we had to wait for a table to be cleared for us in the upstairs section. As we were waiting, a table of 6 in the corner stood up and left. On their table they left two half eaten 18 inch pizzas. The guys in the group looked at each other and said 'Let's sit there'.

They then proceeded to tuck into the still warm leftover pizzas. I cringed with embarrassment. The waitress was right there. She could see what they were doing. Plus, how could you eat leftovers? What if people had sneezed all over it or something? The waitress came over and tried to take the pizza's away. The guys argued with her. In the end she took one away and left the other for us.

They looked at me and said, 'You have to try some. It's really good. You haven't lived 'til you have eaten someone else's leftovers.' I dithered. They all looked at me. I thought to myself 'the whole point of coming to Beijing is to be adventurous and try new things.' So I consented to eating half a slice. It was actually pretty good. Thin crust, lukewarm, barbecue meat flavour. Pizza always tastes better when it's been sitting there for a while – the flavours have had more time to sort of melt together.

We did eventually order more pizza. Another 22 inch half and half 'Tube Station Special' plus Barbecue Chicken. To be honest, I think the leftover one was better. The base of the 22 inch wasn't as good. I think in making it bigger, it lacked something of the thin and crispy nature of the 18 inch crust. Still, we enjoyed it.

I washed it down with a Tsingtao beer – you know, to kill any germs form the leftover pizza! My mum has a theory that if you eat slightly dodgy food you should always drink beer or coca cola to make sure you don't get an upset stomach. Conveniently, beer is very cheap in China!

I was disappointed with the shop talk. Strangely enough, my new friends - twenty something adventurers from various corners of the globe who found teaching the easiest way to get to China – didn't seem to want to talk about prepositions over lunch. Ah well. There's always next week!