My last stop on the way home from my recent travels was the airport of Amsterdam, and my two and a half hour layover there meant that I had the opportunity to stock up on everything you can’t buy in America:
In fact, expertly navigating the airport (which has the size and amenities of a small city) to the best shop to purchase each of these items, I ended up spending my entire layover stocking up on various chocolates, and – for the first time in my life – had to sprint to my closing gate to get over on the plane.
Most of these items have simple, non-geeky explanations: Kinder Eggs are banned in America as a chocking hazard, Neuhaus Belgian chocolate is only available for purchase in about two U.S. cities, and any other form of Kinder Chocolate is pretty much only available at small hole-in-the-wall ethnic food stores with credit card minimums.
The Mars Bars, though, were absolute geekery. For a reason I have yet to discover (they’re certainly not a choking hazard), Mars Bars are unavailable for purchase in the United States. They also happen to be mentioned in the first Harry Potter book, when the food trolley comes around on the Hogwarts Express:
“[Harry] had never had any money for candy with the Dursleys, and now that he had pockets rattling with gold and silver he was ready to buy as many mars Bars as he could carry – but the woman didn’t have Mars Bars. What she did have were Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum, Chocolate Frogs, Pumpkin Pasties, Cauldron Cakes, Licorice Wands, and a number of other strange things Harry had never seen in his life.”
As a member of the generation that grew up with Harry Potter, I naturally wanted to try every single one of these candies, and remember trying to find Mars Bars before learning that they’re not sold in the U.S. I desired them with the same vengeance with which I wanted to try Every Flavor Beans and Chocolate Frogs. Ironically, due to the powers of commercialization, said Chocolate Frogs and Every Flavor Beans are now easily available for purchase; in the heyday of Harry Potter, I remember many of them for sale in bookstores next to the Harry Potter books, and when I was younger I even collected chocolate frog cards:
My chocolate frog cards, many of them for the same famous witches and wizards mentioned in the books, which for a geeky teenager really made the books seem like they were coming alive.
For Mars Bars, though, I still have to fly to Europe, which in my book kind of makes them as magical as Kinder Eggs, and certainly more so than Jelly Belly Beans with the Harry Potter logo. The magic of aviation is truly great and powerful in fulfilling one’s geeky wishes:
The Itinerant Bookworm 