Thumbs Up for Thums Up

When I travel, I love to try local snacks and beverages, not only from my deeply-rooted love for junk food, but also because I feel like you get a good sense of a place by eating and drinking what regular people have when they're not trying to impress anyone.

My cousin's husband introduced us to kvas, an eastern European drink traditionally made from fermented rye bread. It was like a combination of beer and hard cider: a little sweet and fizzy, but with a yeasty taste. Definitely unlike anything I've ever had before, but in a good way. It's on my list of things to buy from a street vendor if I'm ever lucky enough to visit Ukraine.

Of course, I also love regional variations of store brand soft drinks in the U.S. While visiting friends in Atlanta, we made a point of visiting the local QT (QuikTrip) gas station/convenience store, which has the largest selection of fountain beverages I have ever seen. I recommend the Rooster Booster energy drink.

In Italy, it was the tiny black cans of Oran Soda from the vending machine at American University of Rome. It was a cross between regular orange soda and pulpy orange juice, made by the Campari company. On Mondays, I had six straight hours of class (Masterpieces of Italian Opera to Roman History to an accelerated Italian language course) and I usually managed to scrounge 40 Euro cents so I could slurp down a can of it, usually with a baggie of cookies or a granola bar, to get me through the rest of the day.

While in London, I marveled at the different flavors of Pringles chips at the grocery store, which included Curry and Paprika. Yorkie bars were also fun, if a bit misogynistic ("It's Not for Girls!).

Yes. Not for handbags. But delicious!

 And everywhere in Europe, I bought Kinder eggs. They're just thin hollow chocolate eggs wrapped in foil, and the chocolate isn't anything special. But inside the chocolate egg is a plastic egg holding a toy surprise--things like puzzles, character figures, or vehicles. Once, I even got a green Dumpster like the one in front of our Rome apartment, complete with moving arms controlled by a rubber band. I bought a Kinder egg nearly every time I went to the grocery store in Rome, and I still have the toys. I saw a gigantic Kinder display in the Amsterdam airport, and I promised myself I would buy a few on the way home.

India gave us a few opportunities to try local snacks, since there were street vendors and small stores everywhere, and our hotel room included a "mini bar." This meant that every night when we came back to the room, we could pop the top off a slightly chilled bottle of either Sprite or an Indian cola called Thums Up. I had seen the billboards and bus signs for Thums Up: the slogan was "Taste the Thunder!" and the ads exclusively featured men. A visit to the company website (it's a Coca-Cola product) shows that this is intentional, as the company claims "Thums Up is known for its strong, fizzy taste and its confident, mature and uniquely masculine attitude. This brand clearly seeks to separate the men from the boys."

It's burning his esophagus with its awesomeness!

I don't care that I'm not the target demographic for Thums Up. I was eager to try it. On a first sip, it tastes like a normal cola: sweet, syrupy, fizzy. It's not quite the same flavor as Coke or Pepsi, but it's close. The aftertaste is where I concede that there is definitely something masculine about Thums Up, because it tastes like chemicals. Specifically, it tastes a little like licking aluminum siding (that must be the "thunder" the ads mentioned). It made me think of the smell of ozone, and testing batteries on my tongue, things that were routinely part of my childhood because my older brother liked to take mechanical things apart and build new contraptions out of them, often harassing me along the way. Thums Up seems like the kind of thing Tim would drink. It wasn't exactly a Tesla coil in the mouth, but I can see where they were going with it.

And you know what? I grew to like it. I actually looked forward to getting back to the room at night, because the housekeeping staff would have restocked the mini bar. There's just something about cracking open a cool glass bottle of lightning-flavored soda after a long day of shooting video and taking photos.