Mango Madness

I've been trying as many snack foods around Beijing as I can, especially since some of them are so mysterious. Today I bought one called "Lonely God" with the picture of a little boy angel with wings, a halo, and a magic wand. He's flying over a castle and next to a photograph of seaweed. I really don't know what's inside yet, except that the package was on the shelves with bags of chips and Bugles, which have made it to China.

My recent favorite snack is one I call "dinosaur eggs." A picture of it is in my new picassa web album Chinese Snack Food (which isn't really all snack food, but close enough, and to which I'll add Lonely God soon.) The dino eggs are called peanut crackers and apparently are from Japan. They have "premium soft crunch" and aren't really crackers but are a real peanut covered in an oval cracker coating. They are seaweed flavor, so they have little specks of green which really make them look like dinosaur eggs. With the slightly sweet peanut inside and the salty outside, they're a great snack flavor combo. And the peanut protein is good to have here in "The Land of Carbs," as one of our professors calls China.

I also really enjoyed the mango flavor Lay's potato chips I tried. I just found out that the Lay's characters 乐事 mean “Happy Things” in Chinese. Lays has interesting flavors like cucumber and Peking roast duck. But mango piqued my curiosity the most, and it was worth it--another nice yin and yang of salty and sweet.

Prompted by that good mango experience, I bought the next mango product I saw, mango flavored instant iced coffee. I really must have been blinded by the excellent chips, because no one should ever buy mango flavored instant iced coffee. I don't know what I was thinking except that drinking mango flavored iced coffee might prove to be another counterintuitive yet great experience. Intuition would have been right on this one. It tasted like I had accidentally poured some coffee in a cup of flat mango soda, not realizing I was combining the two, and then took a sip. Ugh, I think it was the worst thing I've had in China beside the mung bean-filled popsicle I couldn't finish eating.

I just looked back at the mango coffee box to see if it could explain to me any more why I went a little crazy and bought it. Now I remember, the poem on the back was too good to pass up. I bought it just to keep this poem:

"I might be burning inside, but outside...my coffee stays cold, man!
When you're hot in and out...cool down with Coffee Break! (R) Iced Mango.
It's a real coffee with a taste of mango.
Easy, just stir in cold water until it dissolves.
The aroma is moutwatering; let alone the taste.
The colder, the better! Go ahead and try it!"

In China's defense, this Coffee Break product was made in and imported from Indonesia. China did make the bean filled (and not bean paste, but actually little beans sweetened with goodness knows how much sugar) popsicle.