Too much Tabbouleh

Kayla Ronning

On Friday night, the 25^th of August, Dalat’s women varsity soccer team gathered together to discuss the most important question of the evening. “What’s for dinner?” Every girl’s stomach agreed that this was an important reason to be pulled away from the varsity guy’s soccer game. All eyes looked to Coach Frohlich for the game plan. “I’m going to my Arabic restaurant with Coach Weidemann and whoever else wants to join. I have never eaten better food, and it’s healthy too,” Coach Frohlich said with such passion. There were no objections to eating Arabic food, so the whole team grabbed their stuff and followed Coach Frohlich.

           

When the team reached the restaurant, the girls started to fill all the tables, and we soon realized there were not enough seats. The owner, who was shocked to see so many high school girls in his store, reacted by bringing out all his staff to show them all his customers. They told us that they had a family room that we could all fit in. Nine to ten girls were seated at three tables. They gave each table one menu and all the girls piled around the menu to figure out what to eat. No one knew what to order, so Coach Frohlich went around to each table and advised the girls.

The restaurant was buzzing with waiters rushing around and taking orders, while the girls competed over each other’s voices to hear their family members on the other end of the phone lines, but Coach’s voice rang out above all other voices. She could not stop advocating for this restaurant. “Girls, you have to try this. It’s called tabbouleh,” Coach Frohlich said as she walked around the restaurant with a spoon in her hand.

All heads turned as food started to emerge from the kitchen. A lot of girls over-ordered. Christian Benman ordered a small Arabic bread, but a more accurate description of the size would be extra-large.  This was not the only thing that she ordered, with a shawarma chicken wrap and hummus still on the way. No one was concerned that it would not get eaten by someone that night.

While everyone was chowing down on their food, I noticed that the window to the kitchen was sliding open. A phone peaked out of the window and snapped a picture of all the girls. I decided to ignore it because it is not every day that you have twenty plus people, who are all different races, come to your store. Later the owner asked if he could put us on their Facebook page. Nobody really wanted that so we said ‘no.’

When everybody was done with their food, we paid and walked back to our hotel for a well-deserved rest. All the girls were ready to play soccer the next day.