Micky D's

The McDonald's Belgium website, like most Belgian sites offers you the choice of "Nederlands" (Flemish) or "Francais" (French). It, like every other site with flash in this country, take a long time to load :)

The first difference I noticed between the two sites is that the American one starts out with a giant advertisement in your face - a giant juicy and delicious burger. The Belgian one starts you at a menu with three options. The second thing I noticed is the higher quality of image on the USA site. Strange.

Other interesting differences:

- The USA site offers "Meat Bundles" and the Belgian site offers "P'tit Plaisirs" or "little pleasures"
- The USA website doesn't have a specific place for kids, but I'm sure you can google their kids stuff, meanwhile in Belgium, where people take their kids everywhere and let them run around unsupervised has a whole area on their website for children
- The Belgian website offers a "Quality" area where you can learn about health and how they get their ingredients. On the USA website that stuff is hidden under the food.
- The Belgian site likes putting "Mc" in front of everything. You can even get a "McJob!"

Because I couldn't get to a McDonald's I asked around about it. I expected students to say they didn't like it. But plenty of people did. The difference is cute though, instead of calling it McDonalds, they call it McDo! (pronounced like "dough") Even the Belgian website embraces that name, and I've yet to see Mickey D's on anything in America.

The town I am staying at, sadly, or luckily, does not have a McDonald's. What we have instead is called Quick Burger.

Quick Burger seems to be trying to be a lot like Burger King and McDonalds. They even have chicken wings on their menu!

And finally, though I have yet to make it inside a foreign McDonald's, however, I did make it into a foreign KFC. In Prague, tired and lost we wandered into a KFC. We successfully ordered off of a half czech, half english menu. The food was just as good, but they had no biscuits or cole slaw. Pretty sure cole slaw would be a big hit in Belgium, so I wonder why...