on giving in to a childish temptation

I am trying not to buy Kinder Eggs lately. I've been smitten with these surprise-filled chocolate eggs since I first discovered them in England more than 20 years ago. Inside each waxy chocolate egg is a bright plastic capsule, and inside that is a surprise toy. The prizes used to be amazing—complicated assemblies requiring patience and a bit of decoding. They come with diagramatic instructions, wordlessly suitable for misunderstanding in any language.

Back in the day, you would snap out a dozen or more parts and then put them together. (They don't sell them in the States because of choking hazards for small children.) You might get a Pink Panther, or maybe a race car, or an Asterix. The resulting toy was almost always larger than the plastic capsule, and often a feat of cunning engineering reflecting a weirdly foreign aesthetic. I remember a series of anthropomorphized kitchen appliances—an oven that stuck out its tongue when you opened the door, and iron with yellow hands that pushed its own on button. Hedgehogs were big, too.

Over the years, the toys have become less amazing. There's much less assembly to do, the engineering is less sublime, and the commercial tie-ins go from bad to worse. I thought the Smurf year was the worst, but then came the Disneyfication and the next thing you know, it's Ice Age 3.

Even worse, many of special series toys are the solid figurines, nothing more than colorful tchochkes. My heart sinks when I rattle a capsule and hear a dull thud-thud-thud that's the sure sign of a figurine. I've been known to open the capsule and toss it in the trash in the same movement.

So, given that I'm usually in for a disappointment, I try to avoid buying Kinder Eggs these days. Well, that plus it's a pretty childish thing for me to be spending bucks on, what with the recession and all.

However, yesterday when I arrived back in Buenos Aires for the first time since last December, I found myself putting a Kinder Egg on the conveyer belt at the local "chino" (i.e. mini-market run by Chinese). I'm always more vulnerable when I first see them here, and I give in almost without noticing.

So I open it last night and inside is a perfectly OK truck. Really, I am a bit old for these things. Anyway, it has only three parts (disappointing), but the shovel lifts into the air (cool). At first I want to call it a dump truck, but then I change my mind and decide it's a bulldozer. I'm still not sure, but a brief web search suggests that it might be something called a loader. Obviously, I did not spend enough time playing with construction vehicles as a child.

Swallowing the sour satisfaction of a predicted disappointment, I decide to take a nice picture and blog about it to justify my purchase. So here it is, beneath some of our Argentine plants, almost all of which miraculously survived the cold winter here.