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…fast food.  Burger King, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Little Ceasar’s, Pizza Hut, Popeye’s and so many more line virtually every street corner.  The shear quantity of Dunkin Donuts rivals the number we used to see in Boston where DD is king. 

Normally I would think about this in terms of globalization, American cultural hegemony or other vaguely academic terms.  But on Wednesday night I could only think about it in one way:  The Burger King has a playland.  The boys have been troopers through this move and while it has been relatively smooth the biggest impact on them has been that they have been cooped up in a hotel room with TV as their only friend for 5 days now.  They have been hopping in and out of cars, offices and apartments as we looked at 15 houses in our househunting search.  They’ve been shushed in the hotel lobby and have had to eat three meals a day in a restaurant. 

There aren’t really parks around Tegucigalpa or at least we haven’t found them yet and we’ve had to put so much energy into finding a house and a school for Michael that we haven’t been really able to focus on finding stuff for them to do.  As Jacob says, “We boys.  We need to run.”  So Wednesday night we bit the bullet and headed to Burger King for dinner. 

Strangely enough I don’t regret it a bit.  It’s a touchstone for me about how there are tradeoffs involved in living overseas and I think it’s only right that we make those calculations both for our children and for ourselves.  Just because I would never go to BK if it were just me traveling doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it for the boys to make their transition succesful. 

And then there was Thursday night when Michael asked the inevitable.  “Can we go to Burger King for dinner?”