Asian and Asia-philes alike are often lucky to find the right brand of soba or a reasonably priced lychees or those scary delicious chocolate koala biscuits within easy reach when you’re living in California. Your local Asian market (and there are plenty to choose from, but that’s another post entirely) probably has the hookup overseas providing angelinos with all sorts of goodies otherwise just foreign enough to be out of reach. Those of us exiled to other, less, shall we say, diverse corners of the country are often lucky if we can find an international aisle at our grocer’s, let alone embark on a quest for chili pepper ground the precise size of powder best for that dish your college roommate’s mum taught you to make.

Of course there are worse predicaments to gripe about. Think of all those who might even live in Los Angeles, and having been to the motherland and tasted the fruits of her conveyer belt inventions, is now unable to ever taste something as wonderful as that again! It seems to me every destination has one: some unattainable slice of pocket-change glory that you immediately fall in love with but becomes a mere mirage once you leave that country. You ask the nice teller, but no one’s even heard of your miracle product. In Spain it was the Mars Delight, in Japan the e-ma, in Australia the TimTams, in England the Magma Bar, in Korea the gel-beverage pouch…

I call them IPCs: ImPossibly Cruel. Impossible to predict, impossible to replace, and impeccably traumatic, even you southern Californians are not safe from falling in desperate and fatally flawed love. So, to help you on your way to popping your own IPC cherry, I offer you a few new products for you to drool over in anticipation of the day they too cross the puddle and instill just enough fear in your taste-buds to blow their minds. Or until you cross it yourself. Click each of the products below to see what I mean.

Green Tea Coke You thought you’d seen it all with Coke Black (coffee + coke-a-cola for one kidney-failure-inducing beverage and best friend of cross country truck drivers), and then you nearly lost it with Coke Plus (obesity-incurring coke-a-cola formula meets…vitamin fortification?), but you have yet to see the light at the end of the tunnel with Coke’s newest addition to the infamous wall at World of Coke. That’s right, the age-old standby, the Asian go-to flavour, the most subtle and popular tea is being made into a coke beverage. Green tea in that red bottle. You’re disgusted, I know. Appalled, even. And desperate to try it for yourself just as soon as you can wrangle one that costs less than the airfare it’d take to fly your person across the international date line.

Shiso Pepsi If you were disgusted by aloe pop, yoghurt soft drinks, and green tea coke, than get ready for Pepsi’s newest stab at eastern tongues: shiso Pepsi. Shiso, or plum leaf, is a lot tastier than it sounds. Unfortunately we stateside haven’t embraced plum wine as enthusiastically as I think the general populous should, but I consider the fact that you can find more than one brand of the stuff at large liquor warehouses a clear victory. First stop, shiso Pepsi, second stop cold nihonshu.

Subway signs If it wasn’t enough for you to own shirts you have no hope of translating, now you can publicly declare where you are planning to move or at least worship for the rest of your life. In this case, it’s straight down to Electric Town, as Akiba looks like the only model available here now, but I have high hopes this strange product will expand itself to cover more bases. Personally, I would like to confuse my house guests by giving them directions to the bathroom using the names of Hong Kong underground stations.

Crunky Balls Oh yes, Crunky is already an institution well established in cities with a Giant Robot, but last time I was in Asia I discovered the glory of one of the Crunky empire’s best and most hilarious offspring: Crunky Balls. Tasting something akin to the malted milk ball here, Crunky is like the Nestle empire of crunchy chocolate sensations. Add to the list of things Japan is known for: adorable cartoon mascots, terribly misspelled translations, bizarre crimes, and yes, now Crunky Balls. If you’re not asking your favourite old-man shop teller if you could taste his Crunky Balls in your broken Japanese, than I suggest you start, because we all need to get our Crunk on, in our mouths no less.