Liv­ing abroad will make you do funny things. It’ll have you mak­ing friends with indi­vid­u­als you never would at home, it has you going on adven­tures you wouldn’t ever think you would, and it has you eat­ing things you never thought you’d eat.

Yeah, sure, I’m talk­ing about crazy foods like insects, intestines, pigeons (which is on the lovely plat­ter pic­tured above), duck tongues, and chicken cook­ies (yes, that’s a thing). But I’m also talk­ing about fast food: Burger King, KFC, Sub­way, and McDon­alds, the last two of which were my per­sonal vices in China. Here at home, I rarely eat McDon­alds, and Sub­way even less. One, because there are so many other options for a burger or sand­wich these days. Two, because of the social con­dem­na­tion I’ll face from all my foodie friends and my healthy com­mu­nity. Three, because they’ve been mak­ing too many movies about how fast food will kill you these days.

But when I was in India, and I had a hor­ri­ble stom­ach thing where I couldn’t keep any­thing down, the only thing I craved and could stom­ach was a 5-pc box of chicken nuggets. And it was so com­fort­ing, so deli­cious, so famil­iar — as good as a bowl of chicken noo­dle soup, I swear. There we go, my mem­oir might just be called “Chicken Nuggets for the Soul, A Life of Eat­ing Abroad”.

When abroad, not only are these places and the food they serve more famil­iar, but I firmly believe they actu­ally taste bet­ter than when eaten at home. At these fine over­seas estab­lish­ments, I look around and things are cleaner, peo­ple are hap­pier, it’s an all around more pleas­ant of an experience.

So today, when I came across this pretty awe­some info­graphic that charts coun­tries with­out a McDonald’s, my heart felt a lit­tle heav­ier. Africa def­i­nitely has got some catch­ing up to do. And then I zoomed in, and then, I’m not going to lie, I gasped a mini gasp of dis­ap­point­ment when I saw that Tan­za­nia was indeed blue — a deep, dark, empty shade of blue. I don’t think I’ve ever stepped foot in a coun­try that did not have a McDonald’s…

Luck­ily, I know for a fact there are Sub­ways fran­chised in Tan­za­nia. Don’t worry, it’s only when I’m abroad.

info­graphic c/o hejo­rama

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