McDonald's at a Wedding in Pakistan

my mehndi hand with Iced coffee and fries

For better or worse, I ended up eating McDonald's in Pakistan three times.
Yes, three.
And all three times were purely by accident, coincidence, chance.

It may seem hard to fathom that I would accidentally eat at this conglomerate fast-food chain three times, especially since I usually make a  purposeful visit to McDonald's in many countries.

However, in Pakistan, all bets where off. 
I didn't want to have anything on my To-Do list, because I knew I would be at the mercy of my hosts. The last thing I wanted to do was inconvenience anyone by making them drive all over the city looking for a McDonald's for me. And besides, I checked out McDonald's Pakistan website, and there looked to be no interesting menu items or anything unique about the restaurants in Pakistan. Oh well, I thought, guess I'll miss this one.

Then something incredible happen.
Something unexpected.
Something that can only happen in Pakistan.

It was the night of a friend's wedding, (the same wedding I had flown all the way to Pakistan to see), and the bride had spent three hours in the parlour getting her hair and make up done. It was already 10:00 pm. The wedding invitation said the ceremony would begin at 8:00 pm. But I learned quickly that nothing in Pakistan begins on time. If the wedding invitation says 8:00 pm, that means you start getting ready at 8:00 pm. Don't trouble yourself showing up before 11:00 pm.

At 10:00 pm the parlour is well passed closed, the female staff don their abayas, cover their hair, and lock the front door. All six of us guests and the bride are about to pack into a mid-sized sedan and drive to the wedding, when the bride says something so uncharacteristic of a bride before her wedding: 
"I just really want some fries and a McFlurry."
After minutes of discussion in the car and final approval from her mother, we drove to McDonald's and went through the drive-thru.

It was the first time I had ever gone out for fast food right before a wedding, with the bride in her gown, no less. And it was probably the first time McDonalds in Hyderabad, Pakistan,  had ever seen a bride come through their drive-thru.
Probably.

Of course, in keeping with Pakistani culture, we did not just order for ourselves. We ordered for the whole family back at the wedding. We even brought the food and left it right on stage so that other family members could eat it. Although there was plenty of great wedding food to be had.

McDonald's on the wedding carpet

And you know what I realized?

I was wrong about McDonald's in Pakistan.

It is complete different and unique from McDonalds's in other countries. Case and point:


1. The Middlemen

At the drive-thru window, customers do not call out their order directly from their car, instead a McDonald's employee stands outside the restaurant and takes orders from the drivers, then tells them to the staff inside the restaurant. I'm not sure what this is for, security, convenience?

2. Metal Detectors

This is also the first time I have seen a metal detector at McDonalds. Seriously, I can't recall even seeing a metal detector at the McDonald's in East LA, and that place really needed one. Don't you love how it is disguised with a cardboard cutout  so that it will not be obvious to children.

Alright, the top two images look a little sinister, especially at night. McDonald's is really not a scary place in Pakistan, but I will say that the other two times I went were not at adventurous. The second time was when I was  late for a plane, and ended up missing my flight (well, there is more to that story), so my friends and I hung out at the McDonald's outside of Karachi airport. The third time was in Lahore, after a group of us and stayed up really late, decided we were hungry, and ordered take out from McD's at 2:00 am. 

Again, I got another taste of the uniqueness which is McDonald's Pakistan.

3. Iced coffee

The iced coffee there is creamy and rich like no other iced coffee in the world. My Pakistani friends say that this is because the milk in Pakistan has more fat in it. 

Every time I went to McDonald's I ordered an ice coffee. My second time, I also ordered a tropical juice, thinking it may be fresh-squeezed like the other juice I had from the street carts...but alas, it was not. 

juice and iced coffee

4. Sweet Chili sauce. 

McDonald's also serves a "sweet chili" sauce in addition to catch up. It is actually pretty gross. It tastes exactly like the Asian chili sauces I have put on dumplings, but I don't want to dip fries in it!

5. Halal

Halal, as it pertains to food, dictates how an animal can be slaughtered and eaten. Because Pakistan is predominantly Muslim, the preparation and eating of food must adhere to Islamic law. Whenever an animal is killed, it must be killed by having the throat sliced, and allowing the blood to drain while a prayer is said. 

A Halal label is placed on all packaged foods containing animal product so that the customer knows the food adheres to Islamic law. The Halal label does not only appear on products containing meat, but products containing any animal product in which the animal was required to die to produce the product.

*milk and diary products do not need a Halal label because the animals did not have to die for the diary to be produced. 

*seafood does not need a Halal label because when you take sea animals out of the water, they automatically die.

*McDonald's fries are Halal, because their fries use animal fat. 

Scenes from my Daily Life: Portland, OR

Travel blogging is a dream. 
It's an escape form reality. 
It's the immortalization of those fleeting moments that encompass the 1% of our waking hours worth immortalizing.

I don't travel year round.
I'm not always in Dubai, or Taipei, or Helsinki. 
In fact, I'm never there.
Most of the time I'm in Portand, Oregon.  And most of the time I'm not doing things worth blogging about.

Or am I?

This is a reality check. 
This is how I really spend my time, when I'm not traveling, and not writing about traveling.

Like most people on earth I have to work for a living, and I do (well - did until I quit my job), from 9:00 am-6:00 pm every weekday. In the evenings I exercise (sometimes), cook Indian food for dinner, and do a bit of writing before bed.

On the weekends I have my routine, and I adhere to it steadfastly.
Now that I am about to leave sweet, sweet Portland, I wanted to capture the moments from my last summer in this city.

I have recently become very interested in how people knowingly or unknowingly spend their free time. This always changes, depending on the point we are at in our lives.

These mundane routines can say as much about ourselves as our wildest adventures, in fact, they can say a lot more. 

When one of my friend's was preparing to move to Beijing, she took a Chinese class at 8:00 am every morning. She spent her mornings walking to the grocery store, picking up one piece of fruit, and eating it on the way to class. 
When another friend was in college, she go to Starbucks every morning, order a grande soy chai, and eating a pumpkin score while studying her anatomy textbook.

As for me, here is a scene from my mornings in Portland:

Sitting in a papasan chair, on the balcony of my second floor apartment, eating a Higher Taste Breakfast Burrito, with homemade salsa (tomatoes, onions, cilantro, jalapenos, salt), and drinking a Yerba Mate Pomegranate tea. I'm always reading a book, and right now, that happens to be Anna Karenina.

If you're the type to notice details, you cal tell by the shadows that these photos weren't exactly taken at dawn. Yep, since I quit my job, my mornings begin at 11:00 am~! 

Photo Diary: Best of Karachi

Pani Puri in Pakistan

After eating some amazing home cooking in Karachi, I had the very rare opportunity to venture outside the home and eat some street food!

It was close to 10:00 pm, and the streets of Karachi were already dark. On the sides of the roads, men burned garbage that would leave thick sooty ash by morning.
Although the food cart was only a five minute walk from the house, it was decidedly unsafe to walk the  unlit path to the cart, especially at night, and especially for women.
So we drove three cars and fifteen people five minutes to the pani puri cart.

The cart was on the corner of the main street and a dark ally that was enclosed by three tall apartment buildings. When the owners of the cart saw us coming, the pushed several plastic tables together and scrounged around for enough chairs for our large party. We sat in the dark alley, protected by the buildings to three sides of us, and the pani puri cart separating us from the road. This was the only time I was ever in a public place at night in Karachi, and I was surrounded by friends.

We passed around paper plates and used our iphone flashlights to find utensils. We were all young, form 13 to 30. The streets were dark and dirty, but life was good. 

To take pictures of the food I had to use flash. Of course we ordered Pani Puri for everyone. Pani puri are hollow crackers  that are dipped into a spicy water. We ate with our hands, got dirty, and napkins were scarce. Oh well, that's what the dupatta is for!  Just kidding...no I'm not. 

One of the highlights of the Pani Puri cart was the juice selection! My friend ordered orange juice (on the left). I thought that was too ordinary, but actually orange juice in Pakistan is totally different from American. First, it really is fresh squeezed, not the sugary stuff from concentrate that is sold in American grocery stores. Also, many juicers add a little salt to the orange juice, to enhance the citrus flavor. It was amazing!
I ordered the cheeku/chikoo shake (to the right), because I love the cheeku! It tasted like a chocolate milk shake.

Karachi Home Cooking

Food was one of the highlights of my trip to the Sindh province. Living with a family for five days, I knew I was going to have the privilege of sampling some delicious home cooking. For that reason, I didn't make a list of foods I wanted to try in Pakistan, I would just try whatever was given to me.

The family I stayed with in Karachi was Hindu, so their diet consisted of more vegetables than a typical Pakistani diet. Meat was something we really only ate for dinner, and it was always chicken. With all the delicious vegetables, most of which are not even available in the U.S., I didn't miss meat at all.

One element that surprised me of the overall Pakistani diet, was how much bread people consume. I had been under the assumption that India and Pakistan were rice cultures, but bread is the more common filler in most meals. We only ate rice once a day, and it was during dinner.

In the mornings we ate bread, called a rotti, which is similar to a thick tortilla. For the first two days my hosts gave me an non-spicy rotti, thinking that I would not like the spice. On the third day I tried someone else's rotti and love the spice (which was not too spicy for me at all), so every day after that I got a spicy rotti like everyone else.

For breakfast we ate the rotti accompanied by a papar, which is a crispy cracker.  I remembered having this food before at an Indian restaurant, so I called it "papadum" and that made everyone laugh. I have since learned that "papadum" is a Tamil word, not  Urdu, so that's why no one called it "papadum" in Karachi.

Papar/Papadum and spicy rotti

The other great thing about Pakistani food is the deserts. Overall, there were not a lot of sweets in our diet, but everyday after dinner a dessert was served. On one particular day, it was this Sheer Korma, which is a sweet milk with vermicelli noodles.

Sheer Korma, milk and noodles

While breakfast was usually rotti and papar, and lunch could be a number of vegetable dishes and rotti, dinners were more elaborate. One of my favorite meals was one that consisted of fried eggplant, fried spicy potatoes, which were wrapped in the rotti and dipped in a lentil soup.

Lentil soup, fried potatoes and eggplant, eaten with rotti

Tea is ubiquitous is Pakistan. I had a cup of hot, sweet, milky tea every day. It is most common to eat tea with some kind of sweet bread, like a biscuit or cookie, and to dip the bread into the tea. In other parts of the world I have often drank hot tea with milk, but it was totally different in Pakistan. The tea would come with a thick milk skin on the surface, and I later found out that this is because of how the tea is made. Instead of boiling the tea leaves in water, then adding cream and sugar, the tea is boiled in milk directly. This is the reason this tea is so rich and thick, and why it has that milk skin.

Pakistani tea

By far my favorite of Pakistan's fruit was called the cheeku or chikoo. It is a brown fruit that resembles a kiwi or potato from the outside, but inside it is the most deliciously sweet fruit I have ever eaten. The inside of the fruit is very soft, like a kiwi, and to me it tastes like chocolate.

Chikoo fruit

Typical examples of dinners with rice. A vegetable dish, lentil dish, chicken dish, and fried potatoes.

Rice, lentils with spinach, chicken, and friend potatoes. 

vegetable dish, lentil dish, chicken dish, and fried potatoes

This sweet cracker is a special dessert for the Holi festival which happened to fall on the 27th of March this year. The Holi festival is famous because colorful powders are used on the face and body. At home, we did not go crazy like some of the street parties I've seen. We just used an orange power and put a little on each other's faces.

Holi cracker

A typical lunch is usually bread and a vegetable dish. Here is rotti with a pea and potato soup.

Every lunch and dinner we ate a "salad", which is not like the American salad with lettuce and dressing. I have come to understand that salad is really just raw vegetables. Mostly, we ate carrots, which extremely red and were unlike any carrots I have ever seen. They were delicious and I miss them. We also ate sliced cucumber, which tastes like regular cucumber.

Raw carrots and cucumber

One interesting meal was a chicken biryani. We were on our way to Hyderabad, which is a two hour drive from Karachi, and none of us had eaten lunch. One family member gave us a pot of biryani and we ate it with our hands in the car. I used the lid of the container to make a plate.

Chicken biryani

Every night at the house, before we went to bed, we drank a milk with green syrup. I watched one of the girls make this drink. It is a combination of cold milk and a green or red syrup like the kind we use for snow cones. This makes the milk s green color and very sweet. It looks weird but it takes good. 

Milk and green syrup