Are you like me, did you think I already did Thailand months ago? Well, it turns out that was Taiwan. I was sure it was Thailand - must be one of those Mandela Effect things. There are more snacks this month than usual so I'll shorten the reviews. First a few random facts...
Thailand used to be known as Siam.
Thailand has a James Bond Island, so named because some scenes of "The Man with the Golden Gun" were filmed there.
Sriracha was invented in Thailand.
The Thai alphabet has 72 letters.
Leaving the house without underwear, driving without a shirt, stepping on Thai currency and insulting the king are all illegal there.
In Thailand you wear your lucky color for good luck and your lucky color is determined by the day of the week in which you were born.
1) Big Roll - Grilled Seaweed Roll (Mala Flavour)
Review:
It seems every Asian country is offering a seaweed snack and here we are with Thailand. All the ones before have been the most wretched, inedible things I've tried in these sessions. What are the chances that this goes any different?
Well, here's what it looks like:
Is you mouth watering yet? Oh boy...
And, yeah, it's terrible. One small bite and I want to be sick. It tastes like seaweed. They all taste like seaweed!
2) Party - Fried Wheat Snack Sweet and Spicy Flavor
Review:
Only 2 snacks in and we've already seen two completely different spellings of "flavor"! I wonder how many we can get before the end.
Interesting snacks, these. The base is Double Chex - do they still make those? - No. Okay, the base is like Chex but with an added coating of shiny, dry sweet stuff. Then, with the sweetness, there is a hint of spice. Could the spice be labeled as Sriracha? I can't make that call but it's something like that.
On first glance, I don't like the way these taste. But then the sweet+spicy keeps you going back for more. Pretty good, pretty interesting.
3) Glendee - Coconut Chips (Chocolate Flavor)
Review:
We've already seen this spelling of "flavor". Bo-ring!
Look at that package and tell me that you don't expect to get delicious chocolates. Well the "chips" is the thing to pay attention to, apparently because this is what you get:
These are dried coconut shavings that have a thin coating of chocolate. I like coconut and I like chocolate so I like these. However, they are a bit dry and the chocolate isn't strong. They remind me a bit of Cocoa Krispies.
4) Jack 'n Jill Cookies and Cream Sandwich Cookies
Review:
One of the things I usually like to do, in order to communicate what the foreign snacks are like, is find the American equivalent. But I'm struggling with this one. These cookies, what do they remind you of?
I've been sitting alone in a darkened room using all of my smarts for the last 7 hours trying to think of some American snack that is like these and I've come up empty. It's an impossible task.
But, having said that, they taste a lot like Oreos.
5) Sweet and Spicy Sausage Flavored Potato Rings
Review:
I generally like these. They don't really make them look like a sausage, they look like this:
You know, I don't know what yellow rings have to do with sausage, but the back of the package says "Roller Coaster" so there's multiple layers of naming.
They're corn snacks with a spicy, bbq-ey twang. They're not awfully different from
Fritos Flavor Twists and, speaking of those, Frito offers
Bar-B-Q Hoops which seem to be almost exactly what I'm trying here. Crazy world. So, yeah, not bad.
6) YoFriend - Thai Tea
Review:
These are sugar wafers and we all know what sugar wafers taste like so that's 90% of it. There's also another flavor, the package obviously says Thai Tea but I don't know that it tastes like tea - maybe if it's tea with lots of milk and sugar. It's somewhere between an oat and honey flavor. It kind of reminds me of Mr. T cereal but that's not a helpful reference.
Though I wouldn't recommend going to Thailand for your sugar wafers but these taste great, for what it's worth.
7) Jack 'n Jill Cream-O - Choco Plus
Review:
Eating these at New Year's is a Thai tradition.
They're basically just vanilla-ish cookies with some chocolate flavoring and some caramel. They're very subtle and they're small and there's only two of them in a pack. They taste great. There's nothing crazy different from what you'd expect.
---
So that's it. The Thailand collection almost rivals Israel in its consistent goodness - there were more snacks than usual and almost all of them were very good. However, like Israel, there also wasn't any one thing that you HAVE to try.
And that's all for this month.
