hey guys welcome back to how to switzerland the most
informative and entertaining guide to switzerland on the internet sarah here today and in today's
video i'm going to be sharing with you some things that you can buy in switzerland
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things that you cannot buy in switzerland now when i go through this list i know everyone's
going to tell me you can you can buy those things um and that very well may be true but this is just
my personal experience as an american living in switzerland these are the things i really
do not find very easily maybe there's some online websites or some places you can order these things
but these are common items for me growing up in the us like quite normal things that
you would find pretty much everywhere that are either impossible to find or
a little bit difficult to find or just more rare in switzerland so the first category is baking
items so i like to bake obviously a lot of my favorite things that i ate growing up in america
like peanut butter cookies or chocolate chip cookies different kind of cakes or whatever and
i often run into the problem that recipes call for brown sugar okay and i cannot find brown sugar in
switzerland now if you ask a swiss person um do you have brown sugar if you go into the grocery
store and you ask where is the brown sugar you ask you know about this it's just people will tell you
usually in my experience that you can find brown sugar in switzerland but this is a little bit of
like a cultural clash because if you ask a swiss person about brown sugar they will refer you to
this sugar that you can find in switzerland that's called sukur rotsukur which is basically
sugar in the raw um in that we have in the u.s so it is brown in color but it is not the brown
sugar that a lot of recipes call for so american brown sugar if you're swiss watching and you've
never heard of it it looks like this and so it looks quite similar to brown sugar you find in
switzerland but it's actually just regular sugar with mixed with some sort of molasses and so this
american style brown sugar you can really pack into a ball it's very strange it has a very
um strong flavor stronger than regular sugar so you need it for a lot of recipes but you can make
it on your own with regular sugar and molasses but anyways that's for another video so i managed to
get around without it but this is definitely one of the things on my must-buy list whenever i go
back to the us i'm always bringing back some brown sugar also when it comes to baking i find that in
switzerland it is a lot harder to find seasonal uh baking decorations so for example over christmas i
was making sugar cookie cutout cookies you know that you cut out frost and then put you know
themed sprinkles on top or whatever so for christmas i was looking for some uh you know red
and green and trees and whatever kind of shaped sprinkles that you would find very easily in any
walmart in the us or whatever in the us they go really crazy with seasonal stuff as soon as it's
spring they'll you know have tons of seasonal cake mixes cookie mixes decorations everything
for every little season um but in switzerland they of course do have some seasonal decorations
but i find it a lot more tricky to find um you know like the the red and green sprinkles for
christmas that's what i was looking for mainly and i couldn't find it so it's one of those things
that i added to my usa shopping list okay so the second category is a really really big one you
guys and i'm just gonna group it together and then go over it these are food items that i used to eat
commonly um in the united states but i cannot find them in switzerland and i'm not sure why on a few
of them so the first one i'm going to talk about because it's been kind of bothering me lately is
corn on the cob so this is the kind of corn on the cob that i can find around here i cannot find
corn on the cob um that i'm used to as an american so growing up um corn on the cob that we ate was
a full it's called a husk a full thing of corn in the in the husk in the green part all
of that you buy it like you know like that and usually they were like i don't know six or ten
for one or two us dollars very very cheap corn again i don't know if that's because it's gmo or
it's horrible or whatever but it was very easy to find corn on the cob um sold like that whereas in
switzerland i swear i've been to every grocery store close to my house looking for corn on the
cob because it's grill season now we've got our grill out i love grilling corn on the cob and all
i can find is this vacuum sealed corn which is actually super expensive i think i paid almost
three dollars three swiss francs three us dollars for this tiny pack of two vacuum sealed corns um
yeah they're all right you know i mean you can eat them but you cannot compare it to me to the corn
um that i ate in the u.s that was fresh so actually this one please let me know down below
if you can buy these anywhere um because i've checked cope negro dinner everywhere cannot find
fresh corn on the cob sweet corn another item that i'm not really sure why i cannot find it
is grape jelly so there's all sorts of jams and jellies of course in our local supermarket but for
some reason i cannot find grape flavor you have raspberry strawberry all sorts of other things
but i can't seem to find grape and grape is my favorite i love grape jelly with peanut butter
on a sandwich so good so the next one's kind of funny there are a lot of things you cannot buy
in switzerland that internationally are labeled as swiss so for foods that would be a swiss miss
hot cocoa you cannot find that in switzerland definitely not which is actually funny because
i think it's made by nestle which is a swiss brand but you will not find swiss miss in a
swiss grocery store they have all sorts of hot chocolate that is way better than swiss miss
but you cannot find swiss miss or swiss cake rolls another very popular food in the us you
will not find swiss cake rolls in a swiss grocery store i've also never seen graham crackers okay so
graham crackers are important if you want to make s'mores they are essential they are the
the bread of the s'more sandwich and i cannot find graham crackers here so i usually have to resort
to some sort of uh other kind of cracker um that will kind of work usually they're smaller you can
make them work i can't remember the name of the crackers that i use but i'll put them on screen
there's two different kinds of crackers that i can use to replace graham cracker but if you're trying
to make s'mores or trying to make pie with the graham cracker crust you're not gonna find graham
crackers at least not easily i'm sure there's online shops you can buy this kind of stuff
but you're not gonna find it in a local grocery store next food you might be surprised that you'll
have a hard time finding is pepperoni okay so americans obviously love pepperoni pizza it's
probably the most popular flavor pizza in the united states most people love pepperoni pizza
and if you come to switzerland and you sit in a restaurant and you see pepperoni pizza on the menu
you might think it's going to be a pizza that has little round pieces of kind of spicy meat on it
but pepperoni in switzerland means pepper they use the word pepperoni in switzerland to talk about
bell peppers in german it's paprika i think but in switzerland they say pepperoni which
is actually the italian word so if you go to a swiss restaurant and you ask for a pepperoni pizza
you will get pizza with bell peppers on top this happened to me when i first moved here
i didn't know i didn't i think i was even asking oh they have pepperoni pizza and everyone's like
yeah of course they have pepperoni pizza um but i was thinking it's gonna be something completely
different um so yeah you will probably not find american style pepperonis in a restaurant or in a
grocery store so if you're looking to make a spicy meat greasy pizza what swiss people use is salami
or chorizo so chorizo would be probably closer to pepperoni because it is like a spicy processed
meat so if you like pepperoni pizza you probably want to get a chorizo pizza in switzerland so
the next food category that you will not find in switzerland and swiss people might be surprised
to hear that this is even a thing but you will not find imitation food so what that means is
in the u.s there are you will it's very common i would say in grocery stores that things are
imitation so it's not maple syrup it's imitation maple syrup so it's a sugar mix that is meant to
taste like syrup but it's not syrup okay it sounds reasonable but it gets weirder right especially in
the u.s a lot of cheese products and some dairy products they're imitation cheese and you might
not know it if you're not looking closely so sometimes it'll say like cheese flavored slice
right if it says i think i don't know there's some weird laws in the u.s where if you call something
chicken flavored or cheese flavored or cheddar flavored it doesn't actually have to contain what
that said anyways it's a whole weird thing but here in switzerland i've never seen anything like
that i've never seen anything labeled as something flavored or imitation whatever which is obviously
probably a good thing okay moving on from food the third thing you will not find in switzerland
are red cups i did not know red plastic cups were an american thing until i moved overseas
but you will not find these famous red cups in grocery stores over here in fact i know
a lot of people they seek out these kind of cups to throw american themed kind of parties
or people will literally bring them from from the u.s if they want to you know have like a
cool college party or something it's kind of funny um but here i guess if you go to somebody's house
for a party instead of having like in the u.s you might have like a stack of of course people do it
very differently but you might find a stack of red cups and a sharpie right people write their name
on it and that's their cup i've seen that a whole lot in the u.s but if you go to somebody's house
here for a party probably more than likely they'll have regular just glasses and that kind of stuff
but if it's like with a lot of people and they do have disposable like cups and plates and stuff
they look very different it's usually like um this plastic that looks a little bit closer to
like glass and they're skinny and tall i'll put in a picture but this is what i've seen like eighty
percent of the time at swiss events when they do use disposable stuff um but in general i would say
the swiss use a lot less disposable things um than the that americans do um it's pretty rare here to
see people eating you know in their home off of paper plates or using disposable anything whereas
in the us there were i know quite a few families that use like disposable plates at home and stuff
just to save time it's very um cheap to buy a huge stack of paper plates at walmart or whatever
and uh some people use them in their day-to-day life again not everybody that's not super common
but you might see that whereas here i have really never heard of anything like that fourth thing is
fancy garbage bags so i've talked a bit about this before but in the u.s like garbage bags is a huge
category it's a it's an industry there's all sorts of different brands and marketing claims and that
kind of stuff so if you're used to getting a specific kind of garbage bag that's stretchy
or scented or whatever they don't have that here it really doesn't exist and the reason that market
doesn't exist is because switzerland uses these uh issued garbage bags that are taxed and basically
everybody in the whole switzerland uses this kind of garbage bag they'll be different colors
depending on where they live in switzerland but as far as i'm aware every corner of switzerland
uses this system so you're not gonna find a market for garbage bags because it doesn't exist these
are the only garbage bags you can legally put in most you know dumpster type of things fifth thing
you cannot really buy in switzerland is crazy stuff to spoil your pets and i know this might
sound silly and ridiculous but americans love to treat their pets like a child like a family
member and you know i just got a dog when did we get him about two years ago and i'm obsessed with
spoiling him and buying him toys and stuff and it's so much harder in switzerland to find cute
little doggy things um that goes for like toys and treats and all of that the variety here is just
extremely small so whenever i go to the us i love to go to petco and they just have massive aisles
of every kind of dog everything imaginable different toys different i mean really everything
seasonal toys christmas comes around they'll put out you know christmas tree tree-shaped
ornaments and present-shaped dog toys and they'll have you know christmas flavored dog treats and
fall comes around they'll have pumpkin spice dog treats and that kind of stuff i haven't seen
any of that in switzerland it's pretty basic when it comes to pets here there are of course people
that spoil their dogs there's a lady by our house that pushes them around in strollers i've seen
that so there are those people but it's just not so common to find these massive pet stores
filled with you know all things that pets don't need but owners like to give their pets you don't
really find so much of that here okay last thing you will not really easily buy in switzerland is
over sized mega packs of anything this kind of concept is not popular in switzerland at all and
you will not commonly see massive packages of anything so for example growing up it was very
common to go to the grocery store and buy a gallon drum of ice cream and keep it in the freezer that
was pretty common people just think oh you have a lot of kids and that's you know quite reasonable
quite economical to buy the large size um but the swiss don't really do that um i think in
europe it's more the way things work people don't do these massive hauls um of food at once with
oversized you know stocking up kind of stockpiling one because a lot of the times they don't have the
space because houses are smaller here fridges and freezers are smaller here cars are smaller here
and all that kind of stuff and also i don't know i just feel like it's it's it's just would never
really go down here i've heard i think walmart tried to sell in some countries in europe and
it didn't work and i can imagine why because i feel like in europe people tend to grow grocery
shopping more often you know because often you're walking you're carrying your things home so you
don't really buy these oversized massive things it just doesn't make sense but beyond ice cream
this would also include alcohol you know in the u.s if you go to walmart you'll see these
massive things of rum and vodka where the bottle has a handle on it and again maybe it's economical
you might save per per ounce or whatever um which i guess is good but you're just not gonna see see
that here also have an example of this um as far as getting things in large sizes medication i've
talked about this this is a bottle of ibuprofen i got at walmart and this has 250 tablets in it
and i think i paid probably four dollars for this i don't know not a lot and so this is how
you would get ibuprofen in america and this is not even close to the biggest size you can get
i'm pretty sure you can get them with upwards of a thousand capsules um in a bottle and uh in
switzerland if you go and you try to get this in a pharmacy they'll give you something that looks
more like this and you have to ask to get it from behind the counter um but yeah you're gonna get if
you if you go to a pharmacy in switzerland and ask for aspen or ibuprofen it's gonna look like this
much smaller the swiss are just not about about bulk size anything especially medication i've
noticed the swiss are much more conservative with medication which is definitely a good thing all
right you guys that is it for my list six kind of categories of things that you will probably have
a hard time finding in switzerland again i'm not saying these things don't exist or it's impossible
to get them um but it's just a little bit not so normal not so common not on every corner
so i really hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did leave it a thumbs up i appreciate your
support so so much i really do it's incredible how fast our channel is growing and i'm just
happy that this kind of stuff interests so many people so anyways talk to you guys soon bye
you