When telling a story to people from a different culture, sometimes you have to stop and explain some part of it a bit more. Sometimes it can be surprising to see which parts you have to explain a bit more. For example this used to always happen with "candy bar." For some reason or another, Hershey never made it over here.
As you can see from the picture above, they do have candy bars here, but for a long time that wasn't the case. I have seen some Taiwanese candy bars, one in particular I do like a lot, but they just weren't very popular when people my age were kids. Chocolate in general here is more of a flavor than a food.
But with my experiences with some candy bars from back home which didn't travel well over here, i'm rethinking if it's a taste thing or just a logistics thing. Perhaps a bit of both. If you notice in the top right, dark chocolate is pretty popular here as people generally don't like something too sweet.
Those Dove bars are relatively new as well, having been in Taiwan less time than I have. Also on the shelf that is not in the picture, are Twix and Snickers. Despite more and more chocolate on display, i rarely see anybody eating it. I only remembered this because a friend had Dove bar a few days ago. But before that I can't recall the last time I saw somebody with a candy bar. You'd have to go back about seven years when dark chocolate was pretty popular and people would get it, hate it, and try their best to give it away.
Translation: "yuck this is horrid. who eats this? i can't believe this is popular and I bought it. I better find a foreigner to give this to since they must like this trash."
