Well, my loyal fans, I’ll have you know I got a whole two texts asking where my column was last week. Where was the Broad Abroad? Well, fear not, she’s back and with more content than ever.
As a college student without a dining hall, I’ve been doing a lot of cooking. So domestic of me, I know. But really, I am a pretty good chef and I enjoy doing it. However, in my student accommodations, cooking has become far less enjoyable. With a kitchen shared between only 10 people, how bad could it really be? Very, very bad.
Although the common language on our floor is English, there have been a few accents and language barriers that have given me trouble. Now mind you, I made the mistake of interacting with these people and saying “hi” too many times to only now ask for their names. Why it didn’t occur to me to blurt out “I’m Lulu” on my first day is beyond me, because it would have made my interactions with the 6’8” Romanian guy a bit easier. You thought I was tall? This guy is literally huge—2 meters tall!
As I waited for the salmon I’d put in the oven, suddenly, this large (and very nice until this moment) Romanian guy comes in, opens the oven, sees my salmon, closes the oven, and then turns the oven off. In a mix of awe, annoyance that my salmon was being disrupted, and most of all confusion at this series of events, a weak “uhhhmmmm…?” slipped out of my mouth as I approached the oven.
He looked at me: “Are you using the oven?” More confused at his bluntness, I responded, “Yes…….” “But you’re not using the plate right?” he said as he pointed to the tray that my salmon was on within the oven. My confusion grew, unsure what to say, I asked, “Is it yours?” in reference to the tray. Without answering me, and with increasing tension and an obvious language barrier, “You don’t need the oven(?)”—I leave this question mark in parenthesis because to this day I have no idea if this was a question or a statement. With my neck tilted as far back as it could go in an effort to make eye contact, I stuttered out, “I think it will be done in about 5 minutes…” I really had no idea what to say. The language barrier was also my fault. My Romanian is pretty rusty, so I was no help. I also just don’t speak Romanian. My point is, English is hard, and I should learn Romanian to even the playing field.
He finally leaves, but disaster strikes. You see, there are no pot holders in a student accommodation; in fact, we only have 3 washing machines for 500 people here. Standards are low, as will be the stars in my yelp review when I can move out. In what I thought was an intelligent, innovative solution to not having a pot holder to pick up the hot pan, I reached for my fabric reusable bag.
I picked up my salmon on tin foil, moved it to a plate, and turned back around to the open oven: what was that? I looked down. The bag was plastic, made to look like fabric. The bag had melted all over the side of this cookie tray, which I now worried belonged to the big Romanian guy who was now mad at me. On top of that, the plastic bag residue coated the oven racks, oven doors, and oven walls. Nice. Worse, a girl who never says hi to me was sitting on the couch as I said “Oh shit.” It was only a matter of time until the big-tall-marginally-scary-because-of-his-height man came back.
I started to get awfully close to crying at this point. I grabbed the tray and pushed it towards the sink, burning off all of my finger prints, literally. I scrubbed the plastic. I had ruined his cookie tray and more importantly, the oven was going to perpetually have plastic in it. I’m the problem, it’s me. My panic mounted and a miracle struck: the edge of the plastic stood up and I was able to pull the plastic off in strips. When I tell you I ran out of that kitchen, I’m not kidding.
I haven’t been back to the kitchen since.
Lulu Patterson ’24 (lpatterson@college.harvard.edu) writes Forum for the Independent.