Fast Food meets Taigu

Ben and Alex discovered a new restaurant. It’s called Manhattan and it’s like a KFC/McDonalds fake. I’ve never seen everyone so excited about a restaurant here. (There’s not even a McDonalds or KFC in downtown Taigu.) We all went there today. I was still stomach sick from some strange food a day or two before, so I didn’t order much of anything, but it sure looked like American food to me. Beth said it stuck to your ribs like American food too. The moment we walked in, the people working at the counter got really excited. “Welcome!” one of the young ladies proclaimed proudly in English. (I believe the pride was in her ability to remember the English word, not necissarily out of pride for the restaurant.) We all laughed at the strangeness of it. They didn’t have beef this day, but they did have the fried chicken, which looked pretty authentic. (hah. authentic, who ever thought I’d use that word to describe fast food?) The entire time we were eating we laughed about the irony of it—of these imported people eating this imported-style food. And the fact that if we kept eating here we would actually become fat Americans. They came up to us after we had finished eating and told us to come there tomorrow again for a free meal. Free meal? We were celebrities. It felt really strange and uncomfortable to me. But like Ben explained to me, it was easy to live like a rockstar in Taigu (he, for example, had an amazing sound system and an electric guitar). Easy, if you were a privileged foreigner. Especially because you wore your ID on your face everywhere you went. Everybody wanted your business.