Where diabetics go to commit suicide

No words can express what the following picture can:

Oh yes, my friends, it’s a whole exhibition devoted to my favorite subject: chocolate, chocolate, and more chocolate. You’ll notice that I am wearing pants with an elastic waistband, just in case.

I am pleased to say that this tour did not disappoint. It’s apparently an annual thing, and it only hits five major cities: Paris, London, Tokyo, Peking, and New York. Yes, there is an entry fee, but after that, there are tons of chocolate samples ranging from milk chocolate bits to chocolate liqueur to … chocolate facials? Yes, in fact, you can not only get a facial with chocolate smeared all over your face, but you can also get a chocolate massage. Don’t worry, that’s not me in the picture. Believe me, I’m already broken out enough – I don’t need to test the whole “chocolate gives you zits” theory. Besides, I prefer to ingest my chocolate. What fun is it to have it all over your face?

We initially set out to find the best possible dessert to bring back to the apartment. Our plan was to survey the perimeter and then infiltrate the center once we get a better sense of the layout. Alas, our will powers short circuited us – before we even got halfway around, we had switched from free samples to tartelettes au chocolat and éclairs au chocolat. You can see one of our victims – the chocolate éclair – in the hands of a vendor in the photo to the right. What more can I say? It was fantastic!

But we didn’t stop there. After touring the chocolate museum and sampling a very yummy chocolate liqueur, we saw a group of blissfully happy people walking around with chocolate shish kebabs. There was NO way we were going to miss that! We swam upstream like two determined salmon (Anthony Netboy would have been proud) and finally arrived at the source. Pictured to the left are the white chocolate briochettes, which Colin selected. I opted for a milk chocolate one, which was absolutely as good as it sounded.

Take a good look at the picture on the right … it might be in a newspaper on Monday, since some other guy snapped my picture while Colin was taking it. (By the way, Bill Trogden, no tacky jokes about this picture, please. Colin’s grandma is reading!!)

Part of the fun at the Salon du Chocolat was, believe it or not, looking around. There is evidently a chocolate sculpture competition every year, so there were glass cases with some of the most amazing things you have ever seen. Here’s the home team’s entry (i.e. the US) on the left. But, I think both Colin and I really liked the sculpture to the right the most. (Not just because it has musical instruments in it, of course.) There was a sign that said that it took the designers about 400 hours to put this sculpture together. So, who gets to eat it at the end? That’s what I really want to know.

I have more great pictures, so once I get internet at home again, I’ll post more to our photosite. (I can’t do that at an internet café because I need a program that is installed on our computer.) By the way, I’m looking for a free site to show digital videos, so if anyone has suggestions, let me know. I don’t have a lot of videos, but I’d probably take more if I could share them.

After our excursion in gluttony at the Expo Center, we decided that it was important to go out and work off some of the extra calories. Plus, Didge hasn’t had a really good walk in about a week, so he’s starting to become a pain in the you-know-what. So, we stopped by the apartment to get the dog and took the metro out to the Bois de Vincennes (i.e. a forest on the outskirts of the city). We had a lovely, albeit unintentionally long walk. The weather was really pretty again today, cloudy but not too cold. It really felt like autumn walking amongst all of the trees. So, I’ll leave you with a picture of our walk to give you a sense of what today was like for us. I’ll resist the temptation to title this shot “The End.”