Eaten any bums lately?

Yucky candy

Anyone visiting a foreign country usually will come across a brand name or two that sounds funny to them in their language.

Take these candies, for example. Please take these candies. They are awful. The worst is the mango flavored Mini Bum. El Jefe bought a 2-pound bag of these and they tasted like a mini bum all right. Man! I've tasted mangoes and believe me, Mini Bum is no mango. Luckily we had some Honduran visitors with children who don't get candy very often and they gobbled them all up. I kept refilling the bowl and they kept eating. Who the heck wants to eat anything called a bum?

Hondurans seem to have a propensity for medicinal flavored candy. Jill wrote a hilarious article once about how the upscale restaurants serve a Hall's mentholyptus cough drop with the check. Gawd! They are horrible. But because of that preference for medicine, the Alka Ice must be really popular. Yum! Alka seltzer flavored candy. Kill two birds with one stone.

American Ice Cherry plays on the popularity of everything (U.S.) American. It works. I just love it when Hondurans argue with me about what is American or what Americans eat, as if *I* wouldn't know. It happens more often than you would think.

Do you know that Americans only eat out of cans? That's what one maid told me. She knew that because Americans sent tons of canned food in aid after Hurricane Mitch, so that must be all they eat. Well, they are also surprised that I can cook and sew and clean my own house, not to mention clean up my own dogs' poo, too. Doesn't make any sense, does it, since we are all millionaires? ;-)

Even the Pizza Hut mint tastes like a cough drop. I wonder if they import a special one just for Honduras or if they taste that way in the U.S., too. I always bring home these cough drop candies just to give them to the workers if we have any. The problem is that if we have the candies around for awhile, the humidity causes them to liquefy and seep out of the wrappers. Coming from a dry climate like Dallas, I had never seen anything like that before.

Another brand that cracks me up is Bimbo brand bread and bakery products, which I think is a Mexican brand. I think that Bimbo is the name of the cute little Pillsbury-dough-boy-type icon they use. Correct me if I'm wrong. I tried to explain to my sister-in-law why 'Bimbo' was a funny name to me, but she didn't get it. I think it was because she is just too nice to laugh at dumb blonds or maybe she knows that all blonds are dumb so what's so funny? (ducking!)

Have you run across any funny brand names where you are?

Better yet, if you are Honduran, what American brand names sound funny to you?