Travel Tip: Sometimes the Familiar Can Be More Exotic Than, Well, The Exotic

Image of a Thai Coke can, taken from here.

Acclaimed travel writer Pico Iyer has a short piece called 10 Things Every Traveler Should Do in the latest issue of Real Simple magazine. They're useful tips for getting the most out of every travel experience, whether you're visiting the next town over or the other side of the planet. With this baby's arrival imminent, we're not planning on going anywhere, not even the beach, any time soon. But a woman can dream.  I was particularly struck by this tip, for when you are visiting someplace far from home:

9. Go to McDonald’s. In Kyoto, you could see chicken tatsuta burgers, corn-potage soup, and, in autumn, moon-viewing burgers on the menu, and your fellow diners might be dressed in Vivienne Westwood or Dior. In Bolivia, the McDonald’s I visited was so exotic that society ladies sipped their McCoffees under the watchful eye of a security guard. Even in Manhattan, the Big Mac outlet I stumbled into one morning at 3 a.m. was home to an unexpected but very New Yawky kind of camaraderie. The food is cheap and semipredictable, of course, but it’s all the ways in which the place is surprising that you will take home with you. What else are we looking for in travel (and in love and in life) but a tasty mix of the strange and the familiar?

Ten years ago, when we were living in Singapore, for a little while we lived around the corner from a McDonald's tucked into a corner of the outdoor food court situated underneath a block of government flats (almost every block of HDB flats had these communal eating places). The restaurant used to give me a weird frisson every time I went in -- it was so familiar, of course, and yet, in its Singaporean incarnation, so strange. I thought at the time that someone should write a travel piece about visiting the various McDonald's restaurants around the world. It wouldn't have to be McDonald's, of course -- you could choose any Western restaurant or chain store that seems bound and determined to take over the world. They started opening up Starbucks in Singapore right around the time I arrived (I arrived the day after Princess Diana was killed) and a giant Ikea followed shortly. Both of those businesses tended to create the same surreal kind of tension.

In many ways, I find Nova Scotia, where we now live, much more remote from that world than Singapore was -- when we moved here in 2002, there were no Starbucks here yet and there are still only two or three in the entire province, I think. And there are no Ikeas.

Comments

[Sue]

Don't get me started on the lack of IKEA. Having an IKEA and then having it taken away is worse than never having one at all.

[Sue]

One of my favourite things to do when I travel is go to the grocery store. I love looking at what people eat and how it's packaged. Even traveling to the US, I get to see all those mythical brands that I used to see on The Price is Right.

[123oleary]

No IKEAS could be a good thing, I have to say. And Steph, you can always make a shopping trip to Montreal if you really feel the need.

[kittenpie]

NO IKEA? I'm so sorry... I'd send you some meatballs if they wouldn't go funky on the way.

[Noelle]

We have coke bottles/cans from our various travels around the world. If you ever make it to Italy try the Coca Cola Light...not quite diet, not quite regular...yum.

When we lived in Europe we avoided McDonald's like the plague at first, then it became a fun little adventure, exactly as you described :)

[Terra]

We visit Pizza Hut in every country we travel to. The best PH is definitely in India- Paneer Pizza! Yum!