BIG AMERICA!!!!!

Japan is full of many themed-special-limited-time-only-never-to-be-done-again-promotional products. Right now's theme of McDonalds is... America's burgers. As the promotion is titled "BIG AMERICA!!" There are four burgers that will be offered throughout the year.

First, the Texas Burger (Top left of the photo)This is a hamburger with cheese, special sauce of mustard and relish, a middle-bun, fried onions, bbq sauce, and bacon. How's that sound? It could be good except I don't know about mustard and bbq being combined... eeew.

NEXT! Is the New York Burger (top right). This is more of a straight ahead burger. As you can see it has a different bun... other than that it's just a burger, monterey jack cheese, lettuce, tomato, bacon, and a kind of grainy dijon mustard. I'm not completely sure what aspect of these reflects New York. It's basically a cheese burger with bacon on it... the bacon isn't the "New York" part of it because all the burgers contain bacon. The mustard? That's the same mustard that is on the Texas Burger... sans relish. The cheese... but is New York KNOWN for it's cheese? I gotta say that goes to Wisconsin... So, the bun, I guess that's it. Nothing like that true "New York Bun."

The third installment of the series will be the California Burger (bottom left). This burger has a meat patty, lettuce, tomato, spicy cheese, bacon, and a special red wine sauce. Yup a red wine sauce. That's the "California" part of this burger. The whole wine country aspect of California has been played up here lately. They reshot the movie "Sideways" with an all Japanese cast. It takes place in California still, but it's just Japanese people in it instead of American. It actually looked quite good and it seemed like a tasteful choice of a remake as opposed to our Japanese horror remake franchises. "Ring" was a good remake... that's about it...

The final installment of the Big America promotion will be from the most famous US State (in Japan), the Hawaii Burger. Think Hawaii, what do you picture? Palm Trees? Pineapple? Other tropical fruits? Fish? Volcanos? Well none of those are incorporated anyway into this burger. This burger has a distinctive feature of an egg. It's American cheese, a burger, lettuce, tomato, bacon, "special gravy," and an egg. I'm no McDonalds expert but last time I was here they were promoting the "Tamago Mac" which was a hamburger with an egg on it... this seems like the same thing with a new name.

Oh the joys. So the way this works is, for 3 months of the year each burger is available. They only make a certain amount each day so if you want to try it you pretty much gotta get there at lunch or they'll all be gone.

I'm tempted to try each one to see... but I'm not really THAT tempted.

*UPDATE* I just played a world-themed quiz came called "Sugoroku" in class. Students had to answer questions about countries and places in the world in English. One question was "Please name a Mexican food."

Everyone said "Tacos" so I said "Name one Mexican food OTHER than tacos." There was complete silence until one boys hand shot up and he said "あっ！テキサスバーガー！" Which means "AH! The Texas Burger!"