A Syrupy Collision of Cultures
Today we had pancakes for the first time in four months. We spotted some maple syrup in Rabat’s biggest grocery store, and thus enjoyed a very Canadian breakfast of pancakes and homemade hashbrowns.
Upon closer inspection, the maple syrup has some weird language and iconography going on:
If you click that photo you’ll get a super-big photo. You’ll see that the syrup is called “Nick: The Easy Rider” and has a little stamp symbol that reads “The American Way of Life”. There’s a little drawing of a dude (presumably Nick) riding a motorbike (it looks more like a police motorcycle than a Harley) against the backdrop of the open road and the setting sun. And yet, it’s also got a bunch of German on it (it’s “Ahorn-Sirup!”).
When we flip over the bottle, there’s more German, English and French:
And, as it turns out, it’s a product of Canada. Weird, eh? When I try to access the German URL on the back, I’m asked for a user name and password. A little searching, and I found Nick’s official site. No English, but he looks a bit like Kenny Rogers.
July 15th, 2007 at 7:43 am
I have no idea if this is actually true, but I read once that most maple syrup that is marketed as “Vermont maple syrup” is actually from Canada.
July 15th, 2007 at 9:09 am
That’s a Harley depicted on the label. In fact, if it’s the same bike as Nick is riding in the photo you linked to, it’s a Heritage Softail.
The confusion might be because a lot of police bikes on this continent are Harleys. The Police Special is based on the touring bikes (particularly the Road King), which looks similar to the Heritage Softail from the front. Different chassis, though.
July 15th, 2007 at 9:55 am
We still have our can of Nick the Easy Rider cranberry sauce purchased more than a year ago. We keep debating whether to send it to someone in Canada for Christmas, but then again I don’t know if we could bear to part with it.
July 16th, 2007 at 8:23 am
Cheese curds and maple syrup. Doesn’t sound particularly appetizing.
July 17th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
http://menwholooklikekennyrogers.com/
July 19th, 2007 at 3:55 am
[…] I’ve already alluded to, you get packaging in all sorts of languages here. Some are only in Maltese, some only in English, […]