I occasionally snap photos of instances of Chinese characters being used to write English (e.g., dog, butterfly, crunchy, oh my god). Here’s something that at least in Taiwan is far more rare: Chinese characters used to write Spanish.

米卡莎 is pronounced “Mǐ kǎshā”. In isolation, those characters are used in writing words associated with rice , card , sha sound, respectively — so nothing to do with “my house.”

Although Mandarin does have a “sa” syllable, which is associated with various Chinese characters (e.g., 撒, 仨, 挲, 灑, 撒, 靸, 卅, 颯, 摋, or 脎), making a closer phonetic match with mi casa possible, sa was not used. As the ABC Chinese–English Dictionary notes, 莎/sha is often “used in transcriptions, personal and place names,” whereas sa is not as much.

This store, near the border between Taiwan’s aesthetic Banqiao and Zhonghe, is now closed.