Friday, December 28, 2007





The first one is Sultanahmet Camii, the second one is Aya Sofya.

And some Turkish kids on a school trip, eating their lunches between the two landmarks.

But Istanbul may not be such a good place to take your teenage kid to: a "Westerner"-looking mama and son came up to me today and asked if I knew where McDonald's was. I only knew where Burger King was, and the boy had this tragic look on his face when I said so. "But I need a McDonald's!" He was almost crying when he said that, and it made me feel terribly sorry for his mother. Before this encounter today, I had never understood why a place like Istanbul - where they serve you REAL meat nearly everywhere - needed all those Burger Kings.

2 comments:

  1. The sun never sets on McDonald's.

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  2. As a kid who used to work at McDonalds, believe it or not, I can sympathize with the western kid. As a teenager, McDonalds was the only place that could satisfy my grease and fat fix. BK was ok if I was about to starve and I wasn’t paying for the food, but it doesn't matter if BK cook their hamburgers in a more "natural" way, they just didn't taste as good; not to mention their pathetic attempts as french fries, chicken nuggets, etc.

    I also hated any type of “homemade” food or whole foods when I was kid. If it wasn’t processed up the wahzoo, I wasn’t interested. Needless to say, Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with the family were practically torture.

    However, as I got older and my metabolism slowed down, I found McD’s food (and fatty preprocessed foods in general) less and less appealing. Must be something biological to it.

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