Street food and chain restaurants are two of my favorite things. Even though I’m starting with the latter I got plenty of heat stroke-inducing outdoor fare too, evidenced this nasty sunburn (yes, I wore sunscreen). Remember when kids would rub Elmer’s glue on their hands just to let it dry and peel off? That’s what 65% of my body looks like right now, even my earlobes and backs of my hands (ok, I wrote this earlier in the week—now it’s just my forearms and legs).
Sure, Asia has the chains that have penetrated all corners of the planet: McDonald’s, Starbucks and oddly, Subway, but also regional anomalies yet to grace the states with their presence. A pair of my favorites being The Manhattan Fish Market and Big Apple Coffee & Donuts. This is a near-random, non-exhaustive photo gallery or the franchises I spied during my journeys through the air conditioned malls of Bangkok and Penang.
What’s missing are the slew of sushi, tepanyaki, shabu shabu and noodle chains that had a surprisingly large presence. I am not fanatical about Japanese food in the same way I am about other Asian cuisines, which is the main reason why I’ve never been to Tokyo even though I should know better. I do plan on eventually rectifying this.
By the way, I do not have the know-how to create a proper full page slideshow with nice accompanying text. Sucking my photos from Flickr was the only way I could manage an approximation, but formatting and links captioning the original photos have been lost in this display.
Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer
Sadly (or not—being destitute sucks) I have a day job, hence little time to attend to breaking news like McDonald’s Germany producing a line of cupcakes named after NYC neighborhoods. 
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