In Russia, we don't panic easily. We get used to change fairly quickly. On the day of the self-imposed embargo of Western food, my Facebook page was flooded by jokes about delicious Belarussian mussels and toothsome Chinese ham, some of them already in comic strip form. The reality is that we'll get the same food with a "Made in Belarus" sticker glued on. And a new price, of course. Let those girls cry over the loss of mascarpone, we'll still have our Scottish whiskey and Irish stout, those most sacred of items.
But the closure of the first McDonald's — and the more that followed amid sanitation concerns — was different. People got long faces. Everything about this particular branch of the American fast-food giant was iconic for a person born in Soviet Russia. Just as St. Petersburg was once considered our "window to Europe," this restaurant was our "window to the world." Opened on the last day of 1990, the last New Year's Eve of the Soviet Union's existence, for a symbolic yearly rent of one ruble, the McDonald's represented the change that we'd all been waiting for.
INC News, 16/09/2014
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