Which Reminds Me

When we were children living in a foreign country, Hershey chocolate bars were as good as gold. There were stories of children trading their entire lunch for such a rare luxury as a Hershey chocolate bar. Sometimes people visiting from the U.S. would bring us rare treats such as Tootsie Rolls and M&Ms, but most of the time we didn't have that stuff there. The locally made chocolate bars of the Popeye brand were not so sweet. We sometimes chopped those up to make chocolate chip cookies because most of the time we did not have the Toll House chips available in local stores anywhere, but that worked fine as the Popeye chocolate was also unsweetened. When I visited there several years ago we went to a grocery store and we saw entire shelves stocked full of American chocolate. Nowhere did I see a Popeye chocolate bar, which sort of makes me sad because it would have been nice to eat one of those again for old times sake. But tastes there have changed and now they only have sweet chocolate so that is all they got. It makes sense that they would want to keep their people happy to stay in their home country by providing lots of chocolate there so that they don't have to go to the U.S. to get that. Sometimes those people get fanciful ideas of the U.S. as a paradisiacal place where streets are paved with gold, but it is not so. Meanwhile, the sort of bittery native chocolate that we used to think of as inferior has become a gourmet product here in the U.S. So times certainly have changed.