A short digression

You gotta love this quote from Daily Wealth, one of the free Internet newsletters I subscribe to:

Right now, a Big Mac is more expensive in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico than in Japan. Big Macs are more expensive in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania than in Japan. They're more expensive in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. You have to dig as deep in the barrel as Pakistan to find a country where a Big Mac costs the same as it does in Japan. The Economist points out the big discrepancy in the current Big Mac prices: "'Perhaps the most telling numbers are those for the Japanese yen, which is 28% undervalued against the dollar, and the euro, which is 19% overvalued."

This certainly wasn't true when I lived out in Japan, though I always loved getting a Big Mac and fries whenever I could, which wasn't often as I lived out in the inaka (translation: boondocks). Part of it too was probably the fact that I could only get McDonald's when I was in Osaka, which usually meant I was visiting Joel, picking up family, or picking up my then-girlfriend, now wife, Megan.

Memory is a suprisingly powerful and surprisingly evanescent thing. To this day, getting a Big Mac evokes memories of a warm, well-lit restaurant tucked up under a concrete pillar, with windows facing outward onto the bus terminal where I would always go to either change buses to get to the airport, or to start the long walk to Joel's apartment. I'm sure if a marketing executive from McDonald's were reading this, he'd be be cackling with glee. Evanescent because I can't recall a specific time when I went into a McDonalds and purchased a Big Mac--all I have is a foggy cloud of warmth, light, and saturated fats.

I'll wrap-up the Homecoming saga tomorrow.