Chocolate Traveler-II
chocolate (ninemsn.com.au/blog.aspx%3Fblogid%3D6184%26page%3D3)
The travel duel of chocolate will further on take us where else than to Switzerland, the lands where Heidi is said to have grown up healthier than ever with healthy goat milk and cheese…though I suspect there must have been two or perhaps more than just two bars of chocolate there…Considered by many to be a true paradise of chocolate or as someone once said a “chocoholic’s dream come true”, Switzerland gets to be certainly well known for its many by now “world-renowned names” such as Nestle, Lindt or Toblerone. And how could it not become famous when rumor has it that this gets to be a country where there happens to be the highest consumption of chocolate per person in the world. While there you should better make sure that round doesn’t get to be your favorite shape, mostly because certainly though a considerable quantity of chocolate can undoubtedly make one forget about its sorrows (if any), it can also settle down on one’s hips and simply refuse to leave those easily afterwards. I even read somewhere something quite funny, something that sounds very much like this “A moment on the lips, forever on the hips”. This could very well apply to chocolate…Yet since we are now traveling chocolate we should perhaps leave any diet concerns away and while in Switzerland prize us with an excursion on “The Swiss Chocolate Train”. Curious to discover where this train (perhaps the sweetest train existing) will take you? Well…It is said that “the train departs from Montreux and afterwards makes a stop in Gruyeres” so as to leave as its final destination Broc, a place where one gets to be the guest at Cailler-Nestle factory. So, what are you waiting for? There is a train out there and all the more a chocolate train waiting for you to taste the sweetness of Swiss chocolate and of Swiss chocolate landscape too.
And if you tended to think that the alpine Switzerland welcomes you with just a chocolate train then you’d better think twice. I say this having in mind the many varieties of chocolate that can be discovered once you happened to reach Swiss lands. First there is Zurich with its exquisite champagne truffles, then there is chocolate in Geneva and you may equally well wish to experience the taste of chocolate in Lausanne, nowhere else but in Blondel, widely known as a chocolate heaven as it offers its visitors not more nor less than just about 120 varieties of chocolate. Willing to make your choice in matters of chocolate? If your answer happens to be “Yes”, then Switzerland awaits you. Such a wide palette of choices happens to be there that you may end up choosing from a chocolate bar or a more nonconformist chocolate bath. As decadent as this may sound, I guess no one minds being pampered and allow its skin to get something from the smoothness of chocolate. And so as to finish my chocolate pleading in Switzerland I may as well quote Larry David and say “Switzerland is a place where they don’t like to fight, so they get people to do their fighting for them while they ski and eat chocolate.”
The next spot on our chocolate map gets to be la bella Italia. You’ll get to be welcomed there by numerous adventures, this time some tasting like chocolate and surely any chocoholic looks forward to admiring the splendid sights offered by such places like Milan, Florence and Rome and of course looks forward to tasting chocolate there. As such, just in case these wonderful places do not match your tastes then certainly the taste of chocolate will. In case you haven’t heard so far about Perugina then you’d better be told that such a place really exists and that there gets to be produced a quite renowned by now chocolate and also some really delicious hazelnut candies known under the name of Baci. It could be stated without perhaps being mistaken that one gets to be kissed by chocolate, in this case Italian chocolate. And just in case you may happen to feel like stealing the secret recipe of this chocolate then feel free to attend the special classes being organized there. There is however a thing that needs to be mentioned: in order to understand this recipe you need to also learn Italian because otherwise you risk not understanding a thing.
From Baci we should further move on to France, a France that gets to be not only the birth place of romanticism but also the place crowded by chocolatiers. Where else but in Paris? Take some with you at home or choose to pamper your papillae right there listening to French music and enjoying the Parisian life right at home. Many out there consider Paris to be the “world’s chocolate capital”. And only by looking in the big Parisian garden one will get to see and all the more taste, if willing to, kinds of chocolate unimaginable to many. Have you ever heard anything about a so called Le Salon Du Chocolat? As the name suggests it, this gets to be “a traveling trade show for chocolate”. As such if you feel like traveling with chocolate you may start somewhere in October in Paris and afterwards moving on the sweet path of chocolate along such places as New York, London, Tokyo, London and Shanghai.
Are these the sweetest spots on earth or just places hosting refined chocolate lovers? Just in case you happen to wish to discover these things then you’d better start packing things and embark upon perhaps the sweetest journey of your life.
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