“ Fuck” Fuck” Fuck”, “this place is a fucking shit hole,I just wanna go home” she said as she was walking up and down the Jan smuts dining hall looking for “chutney” and a fork .Fumingly flushed with disgust of looking at the bottom of the salad plate covered with mayonnaise and the only “chutney” she could find, she gave up and sat next to me.
Her disappointment at the dining hall was evident from her eyes that could pour out her suppressed tears of homesickness and irritation, any moment. That made me introduce myself to her and offer her some of my “chutney”. This is how I met my best friend and a true survivor of the legendary food of the Jan Smuts dining hall,Amy Esterhuizen, http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php?id=665831362&ref=ts .
Today,as we talk about the dining hall in her room ,Amy enthusiastically sits up and excitedly tells me about all her,as she calls it, “traumatic experiences” in the dining hall. She starts with the time in Orientation Week when she found her finger nail in her juice and a bug in her salad. “ I felt all the digestive juices revolting and pushing against the walls of my stomach and thrusting upwards towards my mouth” said Amy as she was describing this experience to me.
Without any pause, she went on to speak about the time when she walked into the kitchen of the dining hall to get a tray and it smelt like “a dead rat” or “a rotten banana”. Her vibrancy at the mention of the dining hall topic showed her willingness to talk about her experiences in the dining hall.
Adapting oneself to the unfriendly food servers ,the sticky tables and the “monkey’s brain” like meat was really hard for Amy considering the high quality food that she has in the luxury of her home by her chef mother.No matter how hard it was, Amy managed to pull through eight months of eating in the same dining hall.
On being asked how she managed to pull through,she looked up at the sealing ,sighed and then looked into my eyes and said “This is university,not home .. You get over it”. After making this bold mature statement,she randomly has a sarcastic laugh and says “I have to eat because I have to survive”. That’s when I knew that from the day I saw Amy till today, she has come a long way. Nowadays , neither do the oily chips nor does the fattening food bother her because Amy has changed her way of thinking. She thinks that “if something is not the way you like it,don’t complain rather make it the way you like it”.Infact the same girl who threw a tantrum for not finding “chutney”, taught me how to make a delicious meal out of the meal we get at our dining hall.
Ashness
www.fourhensandacock.blogspot.com
Living the Jan Smuts life
Friday, October 3, 2008 | Posted by Ashness at 2:53 AM
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1 comments:
Like many other first years in res, I could definitely relate to this profile. Amy is portrayed as the victim in this story, but at the end she becomes the hero. The food in the dining hall is the villain and a very obvious one indeed. The disruption that Amy had to face and overcome is the meals she has to eat in the dining hall and it is expected that Amy will feel this way because her mother is a chef. The equilibrium is restored in the end because Amy is able to talk about her dining hall disasters/experiences and laugh about them.
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