My sister Hannah has gotten hooked on blind bags, you know, where you get a sealed box or foil bag with a surprise toy inside. Just search "blind bags" on YouTube and you'll know where the obsession came from, and it's easy to see why! The mystery of which toy you're going to get is exciting and fun. Who doesn't like toy surprises? That's pretty much the whole basis for the Happy Meal after all.
She started stocking up a few weeks ago and amassed a giant collection so Shane and I could come over and we'd have a Blind Bag Palooza. Here is our before pile. The picture does not do the sheer amount of blind bags justice. She got a wide variety of fun things to open. Our contribution can be seen in the brown paper bags with magic marker drawings on them. They're $2 grab bags from Crystal Visions at East Town Knoxville Center Mall, the one that sells pagan/wiccan supplies, those trolls with the glowing red eyes, and an assortment of "tobacco" pipes and samurai swords. We were curious.
Where to start first?
Needless to say, it took a while to open all those little packages, and I think even longer for me to set up this picture. Check out what we got!
See those tumbled stones and glass earrings in bottom right corner? That's what was in our grab bags. I'm sure they have some sort of mystical powers.
There are a lot of popular blind bags right now, one of the most sought out being Shopkins. As you can see from the picture below, they're adorable anthropomorphized versions of things you would buy at the grocery store, and they come two at a time in a little shopping basket. They also include a little checklist that looks like a grocery store receipt. Hannah has been known to drive all over town to find them.
There's around 145 different Shopkins in season (series) 2 alone, so that's a lot of little shopping baskets laying around the house if you're a collector.
Here's a few more of the Shopkins...
Shopkins weren't the only thing we got! As you'll see from the picture below, we've got a few Lego minifigures (two Explorers and a King), a surprise Doctor from Doctor Who (we got the first Doctor), some Hello Kitty figurines, etc. See those things with the giant heads? They're called Fash'ems, and they're a little weird to me. They're squishy and filled with water, and the outsides are almost sticky. Seems like they'd get real dirty and fuzzy real quick.
We also got some Minecraft blind boxes, an assortment of My Little Ponies, more Hello Kitties, and those cute figurines in the back, which are Tokidoki Unicornos.
If you have never been to a Five Below, you need to check it out. That's where Hannah got these fake Kinder Surprise eggs. The real Kinder eggs, in case you've never heard of them, are chocolate eggs with toys inside, kind of like the Wonderball chocolates we had in the 90s. You can get them in pretty much every country besides the United States (they're banned here because of an FDA regulation, and people get fined at the Canadian border for trying to bring them across).
These ChocoTreasure eggs are still technically illegal per the FDA regulations, so it's just a matter of time until they're forced to stop production. Sadly, the eggs contained some of the lamest prizes of the bunch. One did have a cute tiny Hello Kitty figurine, and a couple had stickers, but most had little cardboard people like the ones below. I ate several of the chocolate egg shells and quickly regretted that decision.
We had a lot of fun opening and sorting our prizes. I know what you're thinking, what are we going to do with all of these? Well, Hannah is collecting some, Shane and I are keeping some of the others (our china cabinet, which used to hold liquor, is slowly being converted to a toy showcase), and anything we don't want or have duplicates of will be given to friends' kids.
You never know, maybe this is just practice for when Hannah is a YouTube star and gets paid to do this!
