Chocolate

Well, it was the Chocolate museum today. Unfortunately their website is not very good, but here's the link anyway. There is another link here that is about life on a cocoa plantation and how it is grown that frankly looked interesting.

The chocolate museum smelled divine. Duh. There were student pastisseriers at work across the courtyard, man that could make you hungry. Nomad was fascinated by the process, and she is a reasonably educated audience. I mostly felt hungry. It was fascinating to watch, and to see the different skill level of the various students. They were making triple layer chocolate sandwich-style bonbons, about 1 inch square, a thin wafer of white chocolate sprinkled with cocoa powder, then a layer of softer dark chocolate, then another wafer of white chocolate, then gooey choc, then more white, a drop of gooey on the roof with a chocolate fan on top. Looked pretty darned good. Nomad took pictures.

The statues that they had made were astonishing if a touch freakish..but the museum could have been much better. There were no English labels on many things, which is fine, there is no law requiring this, but the displays were not particularily brilliant, nor extensive, and the English translation they had were APPALLING. Aside from the multitude of grammatical errors, there were some words that were simply wrong. They used ailments instead of elements, when they really ment ingredients. "The ailments that make up chocolate..." I had to read the Catalan to figure out what the heck they meant. At first I was reading it something like this...."chocolate is made of a bad back, trick knees and a stomach ulcer...."

I would go again, no question, but it certainly was not as good as it could have been.

Anyway, we had a lot of fun, the kids drew again, Nomad's littlest producing a particularily amazing piece.

The smell of the chocolate was worth the admission. Got the kids some chocolate goodies, they opted for cones, with dark hard chocolate on top, then a layer of lightly sugared roasted almonds, then a layer of lighter chocolate with embedded almonds and almond flavour. Gonna have to go back and get me some. They also had bars of chili chocolate and ginger chocolate which I wanted, but the bank ran dry, I'll have to go back. mmmmm. Maybe I'll get one of those cones too.

Nomad goes tomorrow. So sad. We have had such a marvelous time. Back to real life again. She is just so amazing.