A Swipe of Heaven

I was starving. There was a bleak hole in my stormach and I was feeling a bit faint. Luckyly I had my ODU student card on my so I could get dinner at the cafeteria in the old Webb Center.



The way the whole thing works is that you have chosen and paid for a meal-plan, I have 80 meals through the semester. Then a friendly person swipes your card through a machine and it subtracts one meal from your card. After this evening I have 56 meals left. Hope that is enough.

After you have swiped your card you enter the cafeteria, and what a sight when you are use to Danish University cafeterias.



There are multiple stances with different kinds of food that ranges from completely unhealthy to healthy. So it is up to one self which end of the spectrum you chose. This day the main course was roasted turkey with rice, veggies and (of course) gravy. I could have chosen sloppy joe's or, as there are almost every day, the stir-fry with rice or noodles, veggies and meat.



The healthy side of me wasn't satisfied though and the salad bar was calling me.



So the final dish was as follows:



All in all this place is a great alternative to the food-court in Webb and probably the only place you can get a whole meal without cheese, in the whole of Norfolk. Subway is somewhat healthy, but help me god, I can't say no to cheese or for that matter extra cheese. But it seems like the main ingredient of American food is cheese and I am sadly not a opposition of this and after I have had my healthy first course it is straight to either the pizza oven or the nachos stand.



It almost seemed surreal to me when I saw a genuine pizza oven in the middle of the cafeteria. If you want to eat unhealthy it is certainly possible here. I have even seen an American eating cereal for dinner, weird. It is also hard for me to walk out of the cafeteria without a trip to the cake and ice cream stand. A good thing that there also is melon.





This day the wasn't room for cake, so I would have to settle for ice cream and melon. Not bad at all.

There is a reason why there is such a radical difference between Danish and American university cafeterias. Education is free in Denmark and a University does not have to compete for the various students on the same level as in the U.S. This means that to attract students, and their money, to ODU the university has to consider every aspect of the college life and here food is an essential part. This is the same reason there is state of the art fitness rooms, tennis fields and much more on campus. All this is not of the same standard in Denmark. Here the budget is for the most part used for academia.