After lots of thinking I decided to participate in a local exchange to get to know town or regional-specific snacks in my new home country. The matching gods disagreed though and matched me with someone from the foot of the Hollywood hills, as I found out from the tracking information. Oh!

More preface: I love travelling and usually come home with lots of new snacks. Last year I visited a conference in Utah and decided to add another 9 days to visit a few national parks. This was probably the only trip ever where I didn't look at what supermarkets have to offer as I was mostly out and about in nature. Or sat in the car to get to the next destination. I had nice dinners in the evening though. Thus with this preface this exchange got even more exciting as I don't know what kind of snacks there are other than those you can buy all over the world.

So as soon as I got the notification the parcel had arrived at my local post office I ran out of the office, jumped on the bike and picked it up. Someone seems to have given the parcel a good beating as it's very dented, but this is snacks, and not a porcelain figurine exchange. No problem. I saw on the customs label that there are 15 items inside! Rushed into office kitchen, grabbed knife and cut through the massive amount of stickers and address labels.

And then: Oh Wow, what a full package! My Santa also seems to like Tetris as everything was stacked perfectly without air inbetween. And whenever I removed one item there was something else underneath. I don't quite know yet what most of them are, and I'm probably most intrigued by the melon-candies and the tortilla chips. We have tortilla chips here but I'm sure they taste nothing like these. Twinkies: I heard of them, but never knew what they were. Something sour: yay! A type of berries I never heard about covered in chocolate: yum! cracklings! Bean dip? Intriguing. And more 'junk'. Everything looks absolutely fantastic and very interesting. I can't wait to get tasting!

Thanks a lot dear Santa. This certainly is very different to what I was thinking of, but every bit as amazing, if not better.

addition: the red lollipops are amazing! I don't think I ever had a better, more interesting snack. First there's the taste of chilli pepper which is odd on something that's supposed to be sweet. Then a bit of acidity coming through. And the more I suck on it the more I wonder if it's only covered in chilli or continues like this all the way through. Then it slowly gets sweater. But there's also the taste of another spice that I can't quite place. My eyes are tearing up, and I can't stop eating it. Wow, this is amazing! I think I need more of these.