McDonalds - India

When I went to Australia I know that there would be much American influence including watching the ABC nightly news with Peter Jennings, but I didn’t expect so much influence here in India, at least not yet. If you turn the TV on, they do have their own stations, and usually they will have a Hindu station, a Muslim station, and a Christian station, however they also have CNN India, and the most common channels are Discovery, Travel, and National Geographic.

Looking out the window of the hotel, and we can’t see very far in either direction, but I can see Music World, Van Heusen, Domino’s Pizza, Subway, and those famous golden arches that seem to be everywhere but the moon! Of course the bottled water I’m drinking is called Kinley – a product of The Coca-Cola Company, and I can see advertisements from ING, MetLife, and Merrill Lynch. This main intersection reminds me of a very small Times Square.

So those of you that know me well, make sure you are sitting down before you go on reading this…are you down? Take a wild guess where I ate for lunch? It would be the last place you would ever see me!!! Okay, so I just had to try a McVeggie! Of course I got the meal with fries and a drink, but I didn’t get a soft drink, instead I got an iced coffee. The McVeggie actually tasted really good. Of course it did, I don’t think we can count high enough to list all the chemicals that were in it, so it goes without saying it better taste good. The fries were, well, what can I say – McDonald’s. And the coffee was incredible which leads me to believe that there wasn’t even real coffee in it!

The menu was extremely limited. They had four sandwiches to choose from. Remember, we are in India where cows are considered Holy, so they had the McChicken Big Mac, which was two all chicken patties (Yeah, right!), special sauces, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun – are you singing yet? They also had the regular McChicken Sandwich, a McSalad Sandwich, which was literally just lettuce, tomato, and mayo on a bun, and the one I had which was the McVeggie. Not really sure what they thought was in the veggie, but it did taste good. They did have a large selection of ice cream. Indians love ice cream, not only because it’s sweet but also because it comes from a cow.

We had thought about going to a Subway as well, but we have ran out of time, so McDonalds was the only American restaurant we went to. We are only in the city of Bangalore for a day and a half, so not much time, plus our dinners were at restaurants that had been time tested, local and very good. One is the Taj hotel which is an Indian chain of up scale hotels, and the restaurants are upscale as well, and the other one called Olive Beach is a local art deco type restaurant that is completely western. When I refer to upscale, in the US the food would be about 20-30 dollars a plate, here 8-10 dollars a plate. Both of these restaurants had great food, but by this time because I know I’ll be home in a day or two I can’t help but think about food back home, and so I’m getting tired of this food and being careful about what I can eat and what I should think about before eating! I have been sick 4 times now on this entire trip which isn’t that bad considering how sick some people get. I have no complaints and all four times it was very minor, and lasted only a day or less. Airline food at this time is starting to sound good!

PS – you should try to write something about McDonald’s, using all the words that begin with Mc, and then have spell check try and fix it! That was a project in itself!