Incident at KFC

  As you may know I am currently working as an English teacher abroad. I’ve made it a point to try out the local cuisine whenever I go out to eat, although every now and again I have a craving for something a little more American. KFC is very popular where I am teaching at, and I go there every now and then for some delicious original recipe chicken.

I ended up going to KFC for lunch a couple of weeks or so ago. It happened to be during their busy lunch hour; had my stomach been a little more patient I could have probably gone inside about an hour later when it would be a lot less empty. Once getting my food though I was luckily able to find an empty seat.

Here’s what caught my eye as I was sitting down. Next to me in another small booth was a woman with her daughter. They were both finishing up. One would think that they would then get up and walk away to their next destination.

You would be wrong.

Instead, as I was munching down on my meal of original recipe chicken and hot lemon tea (I’ve pretty much eliminated soda from my diet during the past few months, resulting in some weight loss), the mother kept talking on her phone. This went on for about five minutes or so, with the mother continuing to talk on the phone and her daughter starring blankly into space. Keep in mind that this is during the busiest time that this local KFC has, and pretty much every single table and booth is taken. People are grabbing their food from the front counter and looking for places that are empty.

Granted, it’s extremely cold outside. Perhaps the mother didn’t want to expose her daughter to the winter bitterness outside, and instead wanted to continue basking in the warmth that the constantly churning original recipe chicken was producing. On the other hand, the KFC I was at is situated right next to a giant outlet mall. Just a few feet away from the entrance to the infamous fast food chain is a large multi-level building that seldom ever even comes close to being full, where she’d have plenty of space to talk on her phone. There are even places for her to sit down inside the mall to talk on her phone in relative peace and quiet.

While I know that I am currently living in a country with a culture that is vastly different from the one I grew up in, I feel that there are still a few universal laws out there. One being that you should be aware of where you are in the space-time continuum and what the other humans within it are doing. And also that once you are finished eating and paying for your food in a crowded restaurant, that it’s time to leave.