Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Most expensive Lucky Charms ever

Logic is a tool best used sparingly.

Would this be a sentence found in the Executive Summary section of a report on what humans do with their fairly large brains?

Expats miss some of the foods from home, that's a given. For Westerners that frequently means sweets.

The Brits used to miss their McVities, their Spotted Dick, their Pringles (not sweet).
The French and the Germans used to crave the heart-stopping gooey goodness of Nutella.

Decades of trade globalization have made it so that the proportion of contraband digestive cookies and Nutella has plummeted. But...

Take our favorite Lucky Charms, the cereal. It has its own Wikipedia page, unlike our blog.
Some online stores over here carry it.

Which makes it harder to justify buying six large boxes on a trip to the States and bringing them back.

Especially, if the Lucky Charms compete for space with aspirin, evil HP printer ink, and some other goodies.

What you need in this situation is an excuse, any excuse, to ship a separate box. For us, grandma's paintings provided this opening. That is grandma's paintings as in painted by grandma, not her collection of Picassos. Very nice American folk art by the way. We built a wood crate for the paintings and used Lucky Charms boxes for padding.

The reaction of German customs to the box was predictably inquisitive. They queried the weight of the shipment (over 70 pounds) and were either unwilling to or incapable of finding out the weight the plywood for the volume required for five paintings.

After several emails back and forth, I told them to just open the box and check. I managed to leave out the "goddamn it" in the greating part of the final email.

We don't know if there will be more Lucky Charms stories.

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