2dimes wrote:I have never been charged a tariff on any cheese I have eaten in France or the US.
In fact we brought home some tillamook and they did not charge us for that either.
Yes, if you're out of the country for 24 hours or more, you can bring back a certain amount of most goods duty-free. So if you were down on vacation, you could have brought back a piece of cheese duty-free. Unless you can afford to go on vacation every week (and if you can you're probably not bothered by the price of cheese) that's not going to help you with your weekly shopping. So, most of the time, I settle for locally-produced garbage like cheddar, boring but cheap. A nice slice of Beaufort on the other hand, which can be had in Paris for the equivalent of $5, will cost you $30 in Toronto. Not too often will my conscience allow me to spend that much money on myself.
2dimes wrote:How much cheese are you bringing back?
Ok, I think I gotta tell you a story...
Keefie wrote:I'm so tempted to send you some Stinking Bishop

By the time it gets there, Canada will need to be evacuated.
Yes, now I am SURE that I have to tell you a story....
I've told you this story before, but it's good enough to tell again. In fact, I have to keep telling it again and again. A part of my life was stolen and I want justice.
In 2009, when I married my second wife, I took her to France for the honeymoon. On the way back, I bought a big wheel of Camembert. And it wasn't the little 5-inch wheel they sell in Canada, it was a big-ass wheel about 18 inches across. Now, experts tell me it can't be real Camembert, that Camembert is only made in 5-inch wheels and never any larger. So I'm starting to second-guess myself. Maybe it was a Rechomblon. Or maybe it was a Brie. I doubt if I would come back from France with something as pedestrian as a Brie, but maybe I did. Or maybe it was a Brie fraudulently mislabeled as a Camembert. In any case, I bought it.
I put it beside my backpack in the overhead compartment on the plane. Haha! I had no idea how hot it gets in those overhead compartments. Like an oven! We land in Montreal, and I open the overhead compartment. A gasp breaks out among the passengers closest to me, and it radiates backwards through the line of disembarking passenges, like a wave. One woman retches, her eyes roll back, she grabs her seat back with both hands, manages not to vomit. Slowly baking in that overhead compartment for seven hours, the giant Camembert had slowly but surely released all of the aromatic compounds which give it its characteristic flavour. All the flavour that it would normally release over many good meals, all at once, flooding through the closed air of the plane.
Some of the faces on some of those passengers were truly worth the price of the plane ticket. They couldn't have looked sicker if I pulled a decomposed dead body out of my luggage. My wife still cracks up thinking about it! What a landing!
Fast forward three years. We're watching a sitcom called Mike and Molly, which is about a fat couple vaguely reminiscent of my wife and I. Mike and Molly go on their honeymoon. To France. This is feeling vaguely familiar. On the way back, Mike buys a giant Camembert. Ohmyfuckingod, please no! Yes! He opens the overhead luggage compartment at the end of the flight, the aroma wafts out, passengers faint!
It's too much for coincidence. Somebody stole that from my life. Some aspiring young screenwriter was on my flight, saw the episode of my life, wrote it into a script for a Mike and Molly episode. He probably got a six-digit paycheque, I got cock soup. I've been robbed, and I keep telling this story to every person on earth, one at a time, until somebody owns up.