The exercise I flew to Osaka to support ended yesterday. So today, Friday, was a day to do catchup work in the hotel room and to walk about the city around the hotel. One of the tasks that my traveling partner and I wanted to do was to find a McDonald’s and get a Japanese-version of an American Big Mac. It was an irrational desire, what with all the other restaurants in the area, but bad habits die hard (as I probably will due to bad dietary decisions such as this one). After all the long hours, we really wanted a Big Mac.

So we started by querying our super sophisticated map applications on our super sophisticated smart phones (me with my iPhone 6s+, and he with his mere iPhone 6) because unlike other Japanese cities I’ve visited, there weren’t any obviously located that we could see anywhere we walked. Guess what? Me with Google Maps and him with Apple Maps could barely find a McDonald’s within the area. We did manage to find one close to our hotel. So we turned our trust over to GPS to guide us to that lone McDonald’s. As it turned out GPS and other tracking technologies on both were truly lacking, and it was as much guessing where the smartphones were trying to guide us as having true guidance from either device. We finally found that McDonald’s after a lot of walking, partly underground, and we placed our order.

I would up with a Teriyaki McBurger, my concession to being in Japan, while he got the Big Mac. I’m not exactly sure if mine qualified as a true teriyaki burger or not, but it was sure slathered in teriyaki sauce. What I can say with absolute certainty is that the fries were definitely McDonald’s fries, just like I’d get back anywhere in Orlando.

At least I wasn’t looking for Subway…