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It had been awhile since we’d eaten at McDonald’s.  Neither Laos, Vietnam, nor Cambodia had the franchise, so we had to wait until our Southeast Asian loop was done before we could eat there again in Malaysia.  Wasn’t hard to find a restaurant in Kuala Lumpur; there was one right outside our hotel.  Oksana went for the Malaysian variation on fried chicken and I tried out the seasonal Prosperity Menu (I guess it only occasionally comes around, like the McRib back home.)  Mmmm…  I can still taste that black pepper!

Not much else to say, except that we saw something new and McDonald’s related around town.  Lots of cars had what looked like Golden Arches parking stickers on their windshields.  Turns out that signifies the driver is a member of the McDonald’s VIP Drive-Thru club, which, I guess, entities them to a small freebie once a month.  Don’t know what McDonald’s gets out of that, but judging by the number of stickers we saw, it seems like it’s a very popular club.

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Guess what?  We ate at McDonald’s in Turkey, too.

Not much to say about this one except that we used the trip to McDonald’s as an excuse to go a little farther from our hotel in Sultanahmet.  We rode the metro to the Kanyon Mall and planned to take in a movie, too, but the ticket prices were pretty high and nothing was starting soon, so we just did our McDonald’s thing instead.  The restaurant was so crowded (and obviously trendy) that we weren’t sure we’d even get a table at first.

And dang it!  This is the third week in a row I’ve posted a McDonald’s video with audio problems.  It’s a really good thing this sort of stuff doesn’t bother me.  This time, it wasn’t the fault of the video camera; what you’re hearing is what it picked up in a very noisy restaurant.  No, the fault lies in that little microphone you can see on the table with the red record light.  The red record light that lets us know it’s recording.  The red record light that has nothing to do with whether or not the recording will eventually be saved to the micro-SD card inside.  It’s only happened once or twice so far, but sometimes the mic (a Zoom H1) “crashes” (for lack of a better word.)  Oh, well.  At least I don’t have to type up subtitles this time.

Part the Fifth: Eating in Cuba

The first thing I should mention about eating food in Cuba is that you’re probably going to get sick. Is that a bad way to start this topic? Well, too bad. It’s true.

It’s not that the food in Cuba is unhealthy; somehow not up to the specs of food in the U.S. Rather, it’s that whenever you cross country boundaries, you’re likely to run into food with different bacterial contents. Those bacteria are not necessarily bad for you, they’re just different from what your stomach is used to. After a couple days of… shall we say, gastronomical distress, you’ll adjust and be good as new.

Actually, you might be able to dodge that bullet completely with a little pre-trip planning. After getting delusionally sick once in Ecuador, I began to look for solutions that would accomplish my newly realized goal of diarrhea-less travel. One of the suggestions that has worked remarkably well for me ever since was to start taking in acidophilus bacteria before leaving my own country. Since I almost always travel in winter (to remind myself that some places outside Alaska enjoy sunlight during December and January) I have made a routine of switching my diet right after Thanksgiving. A simple switch to acidophilus milk in my breakfast cereal and one container of active-culture yogurt every day does the trick! (If you’re lactose intolerant, I hear that acidophilus pills will do the same thing.)

Okay, great. Let’s focus less on stomachs and more on what goes into them.

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