Chocolate on the Streets of Cairo

Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin's drinking of "imperfect" coffee reminds me of a family saying here: "It's like chocolate on the streets of Cairo." To explain, my friend Nancy many years ago (before you could get a Starbucks in Ulan Bator) got a MacArthur grant to go study sustainable agriculture in various corners of the world. So she went off to a remote part of Indonesia for a couple of months for the first part of her study, and there was no familiar food..and no chocolate. No chocolate! So when the first part of the study was finished and she was flying to Europe for the second part, she stopped in Cairo to do a little touristing, and wonder of wonders, there was a newsagent selling AMERICAN CANDY BARS. So she bought one, unwrapped it, and as it was warm, the bar slid out of the paper and landed in the gutter. Nancy looked at it, covered with the dust of 40 centuries of continuous civilization, and did the only reasonable thing..she picked it up and ate it.