10 Swiss Products we miss

For more than one year we are traveling and living in the United States. Living in a foreign country always takes some time to adapt. It was interesting to realize, which Swiss product, that are difficult or impossible to get here, we miss. So here we go:

1. The first thing we could not find here was the typical European indoor electric  mosquito repellant (“Mückenstecker”). That is something you just can’t buy here. So we had to find a way to keep mosquitos out without using those…
2. After a nice dinner we often enjoy a verveine tea (verbena tea). We did search all the major grocery stores and all the tea shops we walked by – but no luck. We ended up using Swiss verveine tea by asking our friends to bring some…
3. We had to get used to change our water drinking habits here. The tap water is usually quite bad and you can taste the chlorine. So we ended up buying bottled water. We really miss the excellent Swiss tap water.
4. It was kinda hard to survive our first winter ever without the typically Swiss cheese dishes like fondue or raclette. We did try a gerber-fondue from a local grocery store here – but it was just awful and very different to the Swiss version of it.
5. The next thing is another classic: real fresh bread with a crunchy crust. Nowadays you find much more artisan bread and – especially in Southwest Florida – German bakeries where you can buy the “real” bread. But in the regular grocery stores it is still really uncommon to find this kind of bread.
6. We do not drink sparkling water that often – but here in the US this really is a luxury product you buy in cans or small bottles – not like 50 Cents a quart back in Switzerland. The reason maybe is, that people here do not drink sparkling water everyday, like lots of European people do.
7. Especially in the first months after arrival we missed some of the breakfast cereal we used to eat in Switzerland. Especially millet or products with spelt are really hard to find here.
8. One day we wanted to cook an Italian dinner for American friends of us. So we just went to the big grocery store we often go shopping in and of which we knew it has generally a good selection of meat. We planned to cook saltimbocca – so we needed some veil. In most of the grocery stores, this is really something extremely rare. In Switzerland you can buy veil like pork, chicken or beef – but in the USA its really hard and sometimes impossible to find!
9. We both love the traditional Swiss dish of  “Pastetli“. And of course you can’t buy most of the ingredients you need for that. So no Pastetli-Shells in the grocery store – but even dried porcini mushrooms or the pork-sausage balls “Braetkuegeli” are impossible to find in the big grocery stores. And if you have no idea what Pastetli is – thats the dish on the picture of this blog… 😉
10. The last one is for our dog Eyra. It is prohibited to import any products with meat. So we had to find everything Eyra likes to eat in local pet stores. After a couple of try &errors we found quite a good dog food. But we never found those charcoal treats we used to give Eyra, when she ate something bad. These treats were really awesome and an easy way to make our dog feel better when we didn’t pay attention and she ate some yummy two day old burger bites from the floor…

But we also realized that we started to love so many products here, which we never would be able to get in Switzerland. So, whenever we’d move back, the missing starts the other way around 🤣

See Three on the Road traveling through Florida with its Godson soon.