Coke: Classic (with Lead)

I stopped by the nearby Mickey D's tonight to get an Asian Mac Meal to go. (The Asian Mac is their new sandwich, it's pretty tasty...for McDonalds.)

So the 3 workers are filling my order - two trainees and the register guy. The one trainee puts the Coke on the tray and I say "Da Bao" (Take away). He puts it in that plastic drink bag they now use. I poke a straw in it 'cuz I'm a little thirsty and I take a couple of sips (while of course he watched - I may have been the first foreign customer he had seen on this, his first evening of work). He hadn't put too much ice in it and I had to carry it home through 90 degree heat so I pointed at the Coke and said, "Qing Jia Bing Kuai" (please add some ice).

He takes the bag, goes over to the machine, then comes back and hands it to me. He had taken a scoop of ice and dumped it on top of the cup without taking the lid off. And the ice was spilling out of the bag. The other two workers started laughing and so did I. Then the register guy took it and sorted it out.

I'm lucky I didn't ask for extra ketchup to go - he probably would have taken the food bag around back and used the kitchen's ketchup dispenser and just squirted extra ketchup into the bag.

I think China needs to check the lead levels in the blood of their own younger people as I am sure this kid must have licked a lot of leaded paint walls or toys when he was younger.

Or maybe he was totally confused. Seeing a foreigner for the first time (maybe) and this foreigner also speaks chinese This is totally against everything teached in China. Normally, foreigners are to dumb to leran chinese

Or, it could be a lack of logical processing ... notice a lot of that, and not just here in China.

I almost never buy fountain drinks in KFC or McDonalds. I usually buy a bottled drink. Sometimes I will go a small 7-up or something similiar, and what I get is a drink with little to no ice in it. I usually don't mind since it's so hot outside and I am thirsty anyhow. I have also noticed (at least in KFC) that there are sweaty, plastic cups of soda on the counters, ready to be sold assembly line style.

Then, if you want your food to go, they try to put the drink in a plastic bag. What's the purpose in that. How does someone carry a cup of soda in a bag? In Korea, they apply this superstrong tape over the straw hole, which percipitated just removing the whole lid. This is where I developed the habit of eyeballing the drink before someone does something silly and illogical with it.

Senor