Chocolate!! May 29th

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Today we ate breakfast, which isn't as good as it was in Switzerland! I liked that breakfast a lot more. We went into the town and we had a boat tour of the city of Strasbourg. The boat ride was 1 hour and we got to see some cathedrals, and the building of Human Rights as well. The boat ride was very nice, and you could listen in different languages as well! We also saw the European Parliment while on the boat. After the boat ride, we had about 1 hour and 30 minutes to eat lunch and walk around if we wanted. I ended up eating some type of ham sandwhich with this cheese cooked on top of it. Luckily, Stephanie Clark loaned me some money to eat! I was so thankful! I talked to teacher who teaches French to high school students and they were here with a class. She was a very nice teacher.

We met up with the rest of the group and the we walked over to a Patisserie owned by Christoph Meyer. He makes chocolate. Let me just say, I ate more chocolate today than in my 24 years of living! He was making the chocolate with alcohol in it, and then put it on the rack so it can settle. Christoph began telling us how he got into the bakery. His father owned the bakery, and Christoph wanted to work for himself. He did not want anyone telling him what to do, he wants to govern himself. What is different between his chocolate and american chocolate is that it is made from the heart. He puts his sweat and heart into his desserts. He uses coco beans and you have to make the right combination and sometimes it has to be the right temperature. He uses sugars from Africa as well, cane sugar. Then he pulls out some chocolate for us to taste. We had 7 different chocolates. These were all different flavors. I remember one had chili spice. It was so different. No place I know of in Texas or America will do things like that! After eating all these chocolates, I started to feel icky! I don't eat sweets, so I was almost dizzy. After eating the chocoates, we had ice cream! Christoph probably had around 12 or so arrangements of different ice cream. My favorite was the Lily ice cream! We all sampled each others! This was such a nice tour that we had today! He made Blue Bell ice cream look bad, and he makes US chocolate look bad as well.

After this tour, we had 2 hour of free time. We went into the French Cathedral and we looked at the clock that shows life every 15 mintues. It goes from birth, adolescent, adult, senior, death. It was very cool. After that me, stephanie, and krystal walked around for a while. We met back up as a group, and then we headed home. We stopped by the grocery store to get food, then we came home and ate. A few of us sat outside and talked, it was very nice.

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