I'm Lovin' It.

Well, I finally cracked. 142 days after arriving in Singapore, I went to McDonalds for food. I had a shitty day. As people who read my earlier travel diaries (as such things were known before the blogosphere took over the world) will know, at some point when travelling I usually go and see what the country I'm in offers as an alternative to a 'Royale wit'cheese'. Singapore doesn't appear to have an equivalent to a quarter pounder with cheese (they got the metric system...) though it didn't stop me forlornly asking for one and looking like the biggest tourist in the world. This of course caused a massive panic behind the counter, as it was a deviation from the script and Singaporeans in the service industry don't like that one bit. I could see the girl trying to work out what I could possibly mean and throwing out random items from the menu in order to meet my insistent demands for something totally alien to her comprehension. In what was a somewhat mean spirited gesture, I compounded the issue by offering the balance of the transaction in change to make the returning change an even dollar amount. Now this doesn't seem evil, but in fact it's a great way to get revenge on shop assistants here as it's not a common practise and it makes them do maths in their head, which they don't like very much, preferring to read off what the till tells them to give you.

The thing about going into McDonalds is that I always feel guilty. I always feel uncool. I always think that the people in there are looking at me, silently screaming 'you're eating crap' in their heads. It always takes me a while to realise that in fact they are also customers who have chosen to patronise the golden arches through choice and are in fact, probably looking forward to their McSpicys, which turned out to be the most esoteric thing on the menu, though as it was made of chicken I ruled that it couldn't be the 'Royale wit'cheese' equivalent. The other thing is that in Singapore you can eat much much better food for a lot less cash at any hawker centre you care to throw a kway teow at. Which shows you how shitty my day was.

The thing that I find really obscene (and this is probably to parry the low cost of hawker centres) is that you can get McDelivery here. ANYTHING from the menu, even if it is an apple pie at 1 SGD (about 30p). Sure they will charge you 2 SGD to deliver your order, but for your £1 a man will drive a fossil fuel consuming scooter to your over air conditioned place of work to stuff your fat face with an apple pie, 24hrs a day, 7 days a week. Nice.

Oddly, the McDonalds was full of children studying. I'm not sure if this is because the library had closed, or this is a different version of the Hamburger University that you read about but it was a bit odd. "Still", I thought. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" and pulled out my French coursework. Pass the chilli ketchup?