McTravel

As anyone who has had the misfortune to travel with me knows, one of my travel peculiarities is to stop at a McDonald's restaurant once on every trip. It's not as if I like McDonald's - I'm not a big fan of them, and I truly hate the McDonaldization of the world (another word which I which I would have coined). It's almost a perverse joy, because I almost never go to McDonald's back in the States. I want to see if a Big Mac tastes the same every place in the world, which it essentially does - although the meat in foreign Big Macs is sometimes even dodgier than back home. Plus, I want to see if they cost the same, which they always do, whether you are paying in euros or forints or lira or dihrams or dinar or yuan. However, the $4.50 that you are laying out for a Big Mac in the US is a very different $4.50 in equivalent yuan that you are paying in China; meaning that instead of a convenient throw-away meal on the run that you are wolfing down in the US, you are making a status statement in other parts of the world (you can afford to pay that $4.50 equivalent in yuan). One of my Hungarian friends told me that they were really excited when McDonald's showed up in Budapest because it showed that they had arrived on the world market (and because McDonald's had cleaner restrooms). One of the other reasons to eat at McDonald's is to try their usual clumsy attempts to regional dishes. Here's a picture of a McIberica, which I picked up at the Madrid Airport on the way back from Portugal. It has ham on top because, well, it's just what the Spanish do (check out my earlier posting about the Museum of Ham). Obviously, the McIberica would not be a big seller in the Islamic world, where you have to settle for the McArabiya (and let's not even get into the chicken equivalents at Indian McDonald's).