Taste the Unexpected

In another country without your favorite foods, foods your comfortable with, foods you know, you discover a great deal about what constitutes your taste buds, even about food memory.
For instance, upon waking from my jet lag here in China, I awoke with a ravenous stomach. I’d hadn’t had a chance to grocery shop yet, especially seeing that it was somewhere before dawn, and was therefore relegated to borrowing some of my roommate’s food. I’d found a bag of what we in America would assume were cookies. However, memories prevented me from assuming such on this occasion.
A Japanese neighbor had once thought she was treating my parents and me by giving us a package of bite-sized snacks. The colorful, jubilant aluminum-foil-like wrapped gave my mother and me the assumption that we were about to eat something sweet, something like a cookie. We each bit in to one, sourly disappointed. We pinched up our faces in acrid distaste for the bitter, sour taste of crackers. Not a single one of those snacks saw the likes of another mouth in that household.
On several other occasions I have been saddened to discover that I don’t like Italian pastries, or desserts made by Indian, Hispanic, or basically any other culture. I love ethnic food. Sampling them and experimenting in other countries or in food cities like Chicago, New York and San Francisco is one of life’s great pleasures. But the desserts I can let stand. All the better, I suppose, for then at least something doesn’t go to my hips.
That morning I knew better to assume. I sniffed the half-dollar sized spheres to learn they would not be salty. I noticed their sandy hue and somewhat flowery embossing. I ate three or four from what must be a couple hundred in the bag.
What did I find? They were pleasant! Not bitter like that Japanese cracker, not overly sweet like Hispanic candies, not dry and bland like most Italian pastries. The taste was simple, perfectly suitable for morning tea or an afternoon snack. Later, I ate more, somehow finally finding the right word to sum up what my taste buds had brought to the tip of my tongue: they’re graham crackers. They’re graham crackers!
I’ve always been a fan of graham crackers. I’m accustomed to America’s long, rectangular forms, but here they were bite-sized and round.
“Have all you like,” my roommate told me. “I do not like those. I bought that whole bag of them thinking they were something else.”
Sounded familiar.