A dream was going against my favor this morning and I found myself awake at 5am. I went online, told Google that I wanted results in English for the zillionth time, and discovered that the McDonald's downstairs was not only open 24 hours, but that McDonald's in Hong Kong DELIVERS. I'm genuinely curious but decide that for the morning, seeing as it was early enough for McDonald's to be unpopulated, I would take a self-indulgent dine-in meal. (In Causeway Bay where I live, it's near impossible to take a fast food meal without sharing a cramped booth with some random old people who pick their teeth while watching you eat.) Footnote: I'm not being overly dramatic. In the Hong Kong cheap eats world, everyone shares tables, nobody talks to each other, and people love to pick their teeth. (Sometimes behind the green surgical masks. The city never quite got over SARS.)
In my best Cantonese, I explain that in the US, you get the Monopoly game pieces with hash browns, and not just after 11:00am. I receive a packet of butter.
I sit down by the window. It's still dark outside, and beaten down middle-aged men and women - a Chinese version of the kind described by Kerouac at the end of that book - push trolleys of fresh newspapers into the main streets and bags of garbage into those narrow inefficiencies in the real estate market known as alleys. Inside McDonald's, the theme song from Casablanca, "As Time Goes By" begins to play. But this is neither a gin joint nor a bar, just another McDonald's on the other side of the world. It does, however, make a fantastic fried chicken with eggs.
You have to stay logged in to your Google Account for it to remember your language prefs.
ReplyDeleteIf you use http://www.google.com/ncr , you'll always get the English version.
ReplyDeleteIt's especially annoying in places where the word for "English" is non-obvious, since the list is in the local language.