Since I have never lived out of New England (Plattsburgh NY doesn’t count - it’s practically New England), I haven’t had a chance to miss anything.
But, many years ago I did a favor for a fellow doper. She had moved to South Africa and was missing, of all things, dryer sheets. I went to BJ’s Wholesale and got a big box and sent them off to her. I can’t imagine not being able to have regular access to dryer sheets.
Someone should organize an exchange for shipping things like PB overseas and chocolate back here. I just ate a Kit Kat. Good lord, those things are nasty.
What are these “dryers” you speak of? I’ve never seen one in Asia . . . can’t say I really miss it so much, though it would be convenient not having to wait for my clothes to dry out overnight.
I’ve lived in Canada all my life (47 years) and have never heard of either of these things. Must be an east coast thing.
Proper pizza. The stuff in Rome was atrocious. The stuff in the middle east tastes wrong. I think it might be the beef bacon (shudder!).
I think enough Canadians work in Yemen that we’ve hooked them on eating Salt and Vinegar Pringles, so I can’t say I miss that when I’m away from Canada.
Proper cookies. I’m sitting here looking at Rich Tea biscuits (cardboard minus the sugar) and Bourbon Creams (something your grandmother would have eaten if she was from England). But I think they only have ‘biscuits’ here to dunk in tea (a drink that I assume is made up of 3 parts sugar, one part water, and a dash or two of lawn clippings). There ain’t no regular eatin’ cookies here.
Maplekiwi, have you tried Sarsaparilla? It’s aaaaaalmost root beer.
Try the Bundaberg brand Sarsaparilla- that is as close to American “root beer” that I’ve managed to find, with the exception of the imported A&W stuff that you can get here in Australia (but not in NZ the last time I checked).
This thread is fascinating to me- I love to read about the mundane details of people from other countries.
When I was living in Uruguay I found I desperately missed US breakfast foods- pancakes, French toast, scrambled eggs, cereal. Mostly breakfast was some sort of sweet croissant. After awhile I slept so late most days that I never even had breakfast. My first meal when I got back was chocolate chip pancakes.
I also missed vegetables, which I really didn’t expect because at the time I was never one to crave greens; I only ate them once a day or so because I was supposed to. In Uruguay, “salad” was a few sad lettuce leaves (seriously, maybe two or three leaves) with some chunks of underripe tomato and a heaping drizzle of vinegar.
I also missed menthol cigarettes, which I had to go over the border to Brazil to get; I just assumed people everywhere smoked menthols.
Threads like this always seem to bring a certain defensiveness, but in this case, it’s worth it if I find out where to get proper bread instead of gluten fluff with no flavour or resistence. Forget the jokes about Finns and their love for salty liquorice, our dilemma is more serious than that. The rest of the world can’t bake bread that’s up to our standards, tastewise and healthwise. Well, Danish and German bread comes close, but no cigars. Thisis the type of bread I crave when going abroad. Or at least, I crave it in the morning of day 3 or 4, after over-indulgence in the local stuff has lead to predictable consequences.
Oh my god, YES. Breakfast foods! Bulgarians don’t really do breakfast, and I really badly missed good breakfasts when I lived there. I once told my counterpart that Americans say that breakfast in the most important meal of the day because it starts your day going right, and she looked at me like I was crazy. (Bulgarians probably think that the most important meal of the day is the bit when you sit around after dinner and eat sesame seeds and peanuts and drink coffee and rakia.)
I just wanted to go to BRUNCH and have scrambled eggs and pancakes and hashbrowns! Oh, I missed breakfast so much. I wanted to go to a cafe and have a bagel with cream cheese or a bearclaw or something. And no one smoking! And a cup of caffeinated, not herbal, tea!
There are actually a few American-style cafes in Sofia (and German-style pastry shops in Varna, where there are a lot of German tourists) and I happily indulged in pastries and (bad) bagels every time I was there. And I had a strudel in Varna. It was excellent. I’d be wistful, but now I’m in America again and I can eat that stuff whenever I want.
And I only miss shopska salata and moussaka and pulneni chuski a little.
At the end of my summer program in Bulgaria, as a thank you to the American University of Bulgaria kitchen staff who cooked for us all summer, we made “American Brunch” for them. Scrambled eggs, fried ham, homefries with onion & green pepper, and toast which we had to sort of broil.
The staff were quite bemused by our antics in the kitchen - especially when we put milk in the eggs (eggs were far cheaper than milk at that time in Bulgaria, so if you wanted more volume it made more sense to add more eggs) but they seemed to enjoy their novelty breakfast.
We also served Bloody Marys & Mimosas - when the staff saw us mixing orange juice and champagne they were sure we were the biggest crowd of drunks on the planet (which is funny, considering).
Hello Again, once, for some Peace Corps thingie, we had a drawing, the prizes for which were items of food from the commissary at the embassy. I won, and got BISQUICK. I mean, sure, pancakes are easy to recreate from scratch, but this was BISQUICK. OMG. It was so exciting. I loved my pancakes so much. Of course I didn’t have any syrup, so I ate them with jam. Delicious. Mmmm, pancakes.
I once made salsa for my colleagues, and brought in a bunch of corn chips, and they were really weirded out. They kept asking me if it was an American salad, and I had to show like, each of them individually how to eat it with the chips. In the end, they liked it, but were confused by the chips. Which was weird, because I bought them in the market in my village, it wasn’t like I had to go anywhere to get them.
I just want to say that I’ve never had any money to travel outside the US except for a week in Toronto and I’m finding this thread absolutely fascinating.
I’ll second what the OP mentioned about buying all your stuff in one shop. In Spain, it was annoying to have to buy fruit from the market, cereal from the grocery, contact lens fluid from the optometrist, aspirin from the pharmacy, nails from the hardware store, etc, etc. Of course you could go to El Corte Ingles (Spanish version of a more upscale Walmart) for this, but it meant a long hike and higher prices.
Things I missed (a lot are food-related):
Mexican food
Sour cream
Cilantro (Never saw it anywhere it Spain. Went across to Morocco and there were piles of it everywhere. Huh?)
Chocolate chip cookies
Baking (Spanish people don’t bake apparently, and stores don’t carry materials and ingredients for baking. I once baked potatoes and my roommates thought I was a five star chef.)
Fresh milk (It’s all that shelf-stable irradiated stuff. Ew.)
Thermostats (No air-conditioning anywhere outside a hotel. Heat turned on and off by the government.)
Dryers (Seriously, people. Why no dryers?)
Gas piped into your home (This was probably the most baffling thing to me. I lived in a building built in the 1970’s, and we still had to buy tanks of gas in the street. Twice a week a man would drive down the street and you had to run out and catch him like the ice cream man. After he hauled up your gas tanks, you would have to hook them up. We had two- one for the stove and one for the water. These things were heavy- fifty pounds minimum. An average woman could not lift one, only drag it along the tile. Then after doing some complicated hooking up, you would have to light the pilot- and of course that was tricky too. If you ran out of gas you got an instant cold shower and you would have to run out dripping wet and change the heavy tank. If you hadn’t planned ahead, no more hot water or no more cooking until the gas man came by again. Several times I had to boil water and take a sponge bath because we had gas for the stove but not the shower. Lamest. System. Ever.)
I’m all tuckered out by my gas rant, but I may be back with more.
After a trip to Italy courtesy of the Parish (so, staying at convents and spending a lot of time on the bus wondering whether the day’s dinner would be penne with tomato sauce or spaghetti with tomato sauce), my brother walked in and said “I never thought I’d say this… but Mom, I want something GREEN! Please! Preferably cooked, I did get some fruit but man I could kill for veggies…”
You know how it’s the little differences? A little difference which always surprises Spaniards and Italians: in Spain, a salad is eaten either as a supplement or as a “first dish,” for which the other options are carbs or veggies or beans, the second dish being fish or meat. In Italy (or at least in the North, I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody from the south), a salad is a “second dish,” so you may get pasta and then a salad, but not salad and a steak like you’d get in Spain. Many of my Italian coworkers were perfectly able to have pasta (with enough cheese to count as a protein-based dish) followed by rice and found my rice followed by fish intriguing (“you’re not eating pasta? not any pasta?”).
Spanish people do bake, but not vegetables. We bake pastries and cakes and roast meats. The gas that’s piped into your house in Spain is different from the one which came in tanks (methane vs butane).
I just ate a Kit Kat. Good lord, those things are nasty.