Überraschungkinderabendteuer

When I was little, I lived for these things.

 

 Kinder Eggs are pretty much heaven on earth and in your mouth.

They're eggs; milk chocolate on the outside, white chocolate on the inside, and hollow. Inside is a little plastic nugget in which there's a toy of some sort.

There's a toy. In chocolate.

 It doesn't get much better than that.

So basically, those were my childhood. In fact, to this day, at my house (in a land far, far away called Washington), we still have several gallon-sized bags in our garage filled with all of the plastic nuggets and all the toys accumulated from these Kinder-wonders.

Then they stopped selling them in the U.S.

"The popular German chocolate eggs are not sold in the U.S. because they are considered a choking hazard. [...] The treats are considered adulterated food by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration," as quoted from this Vancouver Sun article

....................

That translated to having to undertake a 2-hour drive to Canada to smuggle back Kinder Eggs.

Oh, thug life.

So understandably, when I found out I was spending a year in Germany,  home of Kinder Schokolade, I had these eggs in mind from the start.

No, literally.

As in, we landed in the Frankfurt airport and the first thing I did was go searching for them at the concession stands.

Nobody there knew what on earth I was talking about. :(

 A week passed in Germany and I still hadn't seen them anywhere. Not in grocery stores, nowhere in the train station-- but I knew they were there.

Then one day, I saw them. Sitting right by the cash register in orderly little rows, "Kinder JOY" written promisingly across the egg.

I was duped.

It split in half. 

Kindereggs are not supposed to split in half.

Instead of my promised chocolate egg, I got two wimpy balls of choco-something in this white cream. And a toy thing on the other side.

No.

No, no, no.

But then, a Kinder egg.

Not a Kinder Ei, as I had tried to literally translate it as, but a Kinder Überraschung.

It was every bit the egg that I remembered.

Ich war ehrlich begeistert.

Easter's come early with this egg hunt;

I still haven't seen them for myself, but they are out there.

Somewhere.