Culture Clash
I love the food here, but every now and then I get the hankering for some good ol' American cooking. Unfortunately, I can't cook. So, when I get the craving for home food, I head out to one of the American restaurants around here. We've got McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, all the basics. Down around the corner from my apartment there's even a Domino's Pizza, but I don't eat there much. The normal price for a medium pizza is like 20 bucks. Every now and then the local Domino's will have a sale day, though, and they'll sell a pizza for 6 bucks. Those days are good days.
My roomie with our latest Domino's Sale Day bounty
On one Domino's Sale Day occasion, I went in, ordered a couple of cheap pizzas, and sat down to wait for my order. They were pretty swamped that day, since everybody loves a deal, and the store manager was constantly yelling at the employees to make the pizzas faster. Sometimes he would bang on the counter and yell (something like) "Come on, come on, come on!" It was all done in a kind of encouraging way, the manager never singled anybody out, he just really, really encouraged them to make pizzas really fast. This might seem normal to us Americans as we think about this, but that's not the norm over here.
If I had gone to the local "pizza" restaurant a few meters away, I would have experienced something completely different. I would have walked in and made conversation for at least 15 minutes with the employees there before they even asked me what I wanted to eat. I would have been offered tea multiple times. Finally, after a glass or two of tea and some good conversation they would have started on my order, still making conversation as they worked on it.
At Domino's, I couldn't talk with any of the employees. They were running around as fast as they possibly could, squeezing out pizzas by the dozens while their boss "encouraged" them to do more in less time. It was weird to see that kind of environment. It was a little piece of America over here, and it was out of place. I prefer the local way.
