I know this can seem silly to a lot of you, but for me finding a mango flavoured Bounty candy bar was a real shock. Let me tell you why.
If you grew up in Europe in the 1970s, 80s and or 90s pretty much everything changed around you. We changed habits, went from being a series of states into an European Union that allowed us to cross most borders without a passport, we (for the most part) changed currency with the introduction of the Euro, we changed our environmental awareness and policies, to some large extent the food we consume, the clothes we wear, the kind of TV we watch. Heck in 1985 even Coca-Cola decided to cut its ties with the past and introduced a New Coke (to then go back to the original, but at the time we did not know that). Only one thing remained faithful to itself, year after year: the Bounty chocolate bar. Even the TV commercials have actually always been a single TV commercial shot over and over as if in an endless remake, but always with beaches, coconut trees and so on. Bounty has always been (and would always be, as far as we knew!) only chocolate covered coconut. When dark chocolate appeared alongside the classic milk chocolate and the red wrapper alongside the classic blue one, that was already a shocking sign of how “the times they are a changin” to say it with Dylan.
Other candy brands have experimented with a variety of flavours (take Kit-Kat, for instance), but not Bounty. Bounty was THE classic. And then here in Russia I find a mango flavoured version of Bounty (with a yellow wrapper and an equally yellow filling!) that according to Wikipedia should not even be on the market! Russia is, indeed, full of surprises! 😉
If you enjoyed reading about this quirky culture shock, here are the links to my previous culture shocks:
- Risotto (?) in a jar – Culture shock n.1
- Cappuccino with a straw – Culture shock n.2
- Price of Russian medicine – Culture shock n.3
- On the importance of proofreading – Culture shock n.4
Russia Through The Lens 