Food & Фоникс

When we travel internationally, we of course try to sample the food most well known for the culture. Fish and Chips in England, Irish Stew in Ireland, goulash in Hungary, pasta in Italy, etc. But we sort of have a tradition of (well, OK, I have a tradition) of trying to eat McDonalds in every country I visit. I think I have about 10 or so countries so far. Anyway, here's the proof! For those who might be interested, Big Macs were typically 70 rubles, which at an exchange rate of about 31 to $1, that's about $2.20 (not bad, really).

You might have noticed that the title is "Food and Phonics" (phonics being phonetic, of course). The smartest thing we did was to learn the Cyrillic alphabet. Once you get that down, a lot of things got very easy. Well, I won’t try to teach the language or the whole alphabet here, but many of the letters look just you would expect them to, and a few are slight changes. If you see P, think R. If you see C, think S. If you see H, think N. If you see B, think V. (If you see b, think b.) With that in mind, you can probably figure out most of these restaurants:

Я is "ya", Ч is "ch", Й is "ee", the "3" is a Z, У is a "U", and Г is a G.

So, the sign on the far left is "Royal Cheeseburger".

At Red Square, we saw a Baskin Robbins, and coming soon to a nearby mall, a "Texas Chicken". (Gee, too bad we were about a month too early!) I guess "Church's Chicken" was not as big of a draw?

With a few more letters, you can figure out what other places are. The Ц is “tz”, like (“Tzar”), and the И is basically like an “i”, (and Я is "ya"), which makes this a Pizzeria! (The left word is Restaurant.)

Ш is “sh”, but if you might recognize the logo if you’ve ever been to an Auschan supermarket!