Have you seen the movie Labyrinth, starring David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly, and an embarrassment of Jim Henson creations? If you’ve known me for long enough I’ve probably made you watch it.

There’s a scene where Sarah (Connelly), trekking through the Goblin City to rescue her baby brother, bites into a poisoned peach the Goblin King (Bowie) gave her. She passes out and finds herself at a costume ball full of goblins, where she dances with eye-linered, blonde-wigged Bowie (taking himself quite seriously), then a clock strikes midnight and she wakes up in her own bedroom as if nothing had happened. She wonders if she just dreamt the whole thing, then she notices something out of place here, something missing there…the illusion shatters completely when the architect of her pseudo-room barges in from the outside goblin-world and asks how she likes it.

It’s something of a similar feeling in a Moscow McDonalds. When I walk in, before I focus my eyes too intensely, I have the eerie sensation that I’m back at an I-95 rest stop, or about to watch my brother put away half the Dollar Menu on our way back from bowling. Same sterile, pastel interior, same uniformed teenagers, same American pop music, same pictures on the menu…then things start to seem off. Once you get close enough to the menu, you see that it’s in Cyrillic—sounded out, it's just like an American menu with a bad Russian accent (Beeg Mak…Cheeken Boorger…Cheeken Naggats…MakFloory). Everyone’s in less of a hurry, from the staff (come on, dude, I’ve got a tram to catch), to the families who sit down and linger over a meal like it’s that kind of restaurant. The cars in line for the drive-thru are nondescript Жигули s or small, snowdirty foreign cars, not minivans and SUVs.

I always order a large coffee, большое кофе. Кофе looks like it should sound just like “coffee” (ф is an f), but it doesn’t. When I get to the front of the line, I think here we go. I start by asking for “kuo-fee,” the guy behind the counter says “Что?,” I say “kuo-fyeh?,” he looks at me like I’ve just ordered an elephant steak, I say “coffee?” and by that time he’s concentrating hard enough that he knows what I mean, so he says “Кофе?,” somewhere in between everything I’ve just tried to say. I mumble "спасибо," pay my 36 rubles, and make a run for the tram stop.