Ode to Chocolate

I love chocolate. Not only do I love chocolate, I have a slightly unhealthy relationship with it. Chocolate has been by my side and added to my sides through many different scenarios: breakups, baby showers, basketball games, bachelorette parties, bad days, birthdays, and blue sky days. Callier Chocolate Factory in Broc is Mecca for chocoholics like myself. Several of us ate a light dinner the night before and a very light breakfast that morning to prepare our stomachs for as much chocolate as we could possibly inhale.

The presentation when we first arrived felt very Disney-esque to me. We walked through rooms telling the tale of chocolate from the time of Quetzalcoatl to the modern Callier Nestle phenomenon. I kept expecting Briar Patch characters from Disney's Splash Mountain to pop out at any given moment (I'm still on the lookout for Br'er Rabbit, even now).

Walking out of the last room, we found ourselves faced with cocoa beans, hazelnuts, almonds, and peanuts by the kilo. After wandering, we found the chocolate production line where they were producing chocolate logs about the size of Kit Kats. At the end of the line, we were able to sample some fresh pieces.

Then we found heaven. Real, true, eternal, blissful heaven: the sampling room. There were platters and platters of every flavor of chocolate Callier produces. Milk, dark, white. Nuts, cremes, truffles. Each platter had a sign above it so that we could adequately decide how to spend our entire college students' budgets on Swiss chocolaty goodness in the gift shop. They had entire cabinets full of candy. The samples were endless.

I think I lasted seven minutes.

Anyone that says that too much of a good thing is wonderful is absolutely lying. Even the most delectable, delicious flavors of chocolate turned into ipecac in my mouth. I threw up the white flag and headed to the gift shop to by a kilogram of chocolate for people at home. Why they would want such vile tasting, fattening poison is beyond me.

I wasn't the only one that bought the expensive death sentence. The grand total our group spent on chocolate hovered somewhere around 1024 CHF.

That afternoon in Gruyeres, food options were a little limited for a budget conscious college student like me. I had a chocolate crepe.