There Is Such a Thing as Too Much Chocolate

Today was a day of nearly barfing, high-pitched and 1950-like shouts of "Nestle!", a lost/stolen iPod and Japanese tourists. No, Melvin (my iPod) was fine, but my bro's unfortunately disappeared. It was insanely weird though, because the car was locked (or so we thought) and we looked pretty much everywhere. If it was swiped, what a jerk. Stealing ain't cool, yo.

As promised, we jumped in the car (very belatedly, of course- that's just my family's style) and drove through Europe to Gruyere and that Swiss chocolate factory. Actually, it was pretty cool. The tour was free, but of course on a Saturday they weren't really working. As for the nearly barfing part, I would advise you, and perhaps other future tourists, to not eat every kind of free sample they give you. I mean, I didn't even have every kind! I had, like, maybe 90% of the kinds (there were less than 30.. maybe 20) and I was regretting it. So I can only imagine the affects of having all of them. That's right- regretting eating Swiss chocolate. The key here is the quantity, though. That stuff is rich, sweet, deliciously addicting and rich again. But it's goooooddddddddd.

My parents, of course, couldn't resist asking the probably-fluent-in-over-5-languages respondant a bunch of questions working at the free samples place, so I was stuck in that room. Stuck with free, yummy and flavorful Swiss chocolate. But you know what they say about free stuff- it's not. So of course I had to restrain myself from too much of the soft creamy heaven and not barf.

Before the tour we got to watch these old films of Nestle/Cailler commercials and whatnot. It was somewhat amusing and interesting. One commercial featured what seemed to be a mother figure breaking off pieces of chocolate au lait (milk chocolate) to her/various kids, each time accompanied with a harsh yell of, "Nestle!" It was trilling and very startling at first, but eventually we learned to laugh. That thing was probably from like 50 years ago.

After buying a bunch of Cailler chocolate (hmm. I wonder if you guys had heard the name Cailler before?) we got back into the sunned car and drove a bit to the bottom of a hill. The hill climbed up towards a small village called Gruyeres, which had a castle, wonderful overlooking view and a whole bunch of Japanese toursists. I mean, I don't mean to be all racist here, but there were a lot. And it was quite noticeable.

The town was cool though. It was pretty much 147% tourist-influenced, to the extent that an 18-minute video on the history of the place provided indivual headphones for the commentary in different languages. It was sort of weird in a way, and also quite invigorating. We were all watching the same thing, and getting the same information, but sort of all in our own zones.

And so, after the self-inflicted tour of the castle and the fiasco with Zach's mp3 player, we went home. I took some pictures, and found that music was a good inspiration for this sort of thing. More specifically, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' album By The Way. I've snapped a few shots while under the influence of that collection of epic. My camera battery was way tired and I only have one more day of break. But I want to watch baseball, I'm going to blink and it'll be over. I have magical blinking powers.

/ 76 \