La Fiera del Cioccolato Artigianale

The Artisanal Chocolate Festival!

Usually, I find it obnoxious when people use the word "epic" to describe anything but harrowing adventures and impressive battle scenes but, in this case, I will make an exception. The Chocolate Festival in Florence was EPIC.

For someone with a sweet tooth as big as mine (which I get honestly. If you know my Dad, you know exactly what I'm talking about!), this was Heaven on Earth. The only problem: $$$. This stuff was expensive. I went 6 times and only bought something once. But, no worries, the samples were nearly sufficient.

It was booths upon booths of Europe's best chocolate, made in every shape, color, flavor and form that you could possibly imagine. When I say every flavor, I mean EVERY flavor.

Some of the strangest chocolates:
-Pepperoncino (red pepper)
-Marijuana
-Various alcohol-infused chocolates (which were disgusting! Grappa in chocolate? Really? Why would you ruin chocolate like that?)
-Various chocolate-infused alcohols (I don't drink but chocolate wine doesn't sound appealing at all!)
-Basil (apparently, some people put it on pasta. Who knew?).

On the bright side, Italians are very well known for their cioccolato fondente (dark chocolate). Personally, I prefer sweet to bitter but this dark chocolate was amazing. And probably the most typical chocolate of Italy is called Cremino, milk chocolate with a hazelnut cream. Yum. I also discovered a love for marzipan at the festival.

If you're not already drooling, just scroll down a bit. You will be.

Chocolate Nikons (Taken with a Nikon D40)

Tools!

Yum!

Cremino

Tartufo (truffles)

Marzipan!

Kiwi

Valentini

Awww.

Hello Kitty

Gnomes are too cute.

Got Milk?

My only purchase (which I am enjoying above ^^^) was a white hot chocolate. I am obsessed with white chocolate (the more teeth-rottingly sweet, the better) and had no idea that white hot chocolate existed. Also, Italian hot chocolate is MUCH thicker than our watery poser hot chocolate. It's only slightly less thick than a melted candy bar. So, needless to say, my white hot chocolate was pure, face melting rock'n'roll on my taste buds.

Enough said.
~Britt

Back to School, Back to School...

to prove to Dad I'm not a fool. (<<Name the Adam Sandler movie, win a prize)

Classes started this week and I have to say that, having been on break for almost 2 months, it's been a little difficult getting back into it. On one hand, I only have classes 4 days a week (no class on Friday and my thursday class gets out at 8:50am!). On the other hand, 4 of my 5 classes are 2.5 hours each. ugh. Non buona.

Without a doubt, my Food and Italian Culture class will be my favorite of the semester. Italy is one of the world's most renowned nations for food and I am pumped to be taking home with me both a theoretical and practical knowledge of its cuisine. When I get home, I fully intend to intimidate you all with my ridiculous ability to cook Italian food AND explain its region of origin and historical context. Yup. Pretentious Italian food snob in the making right here.

Other than that, I'm taking Intermediate Italian, History of Catholicism in Italy (2.5 hours? really? I thought it'd be interesting but my professor has me yawning already and the workload has left me scared for my life), Journalism, and Music and Film (another interesting topic that looks like it will be made boring by a timid professor).

And I just have to share this. There is a torture museum on my way to class. I don't know what that means but it's certainly worth a visit.

The rest of my week:

-On Tuesday, I walked about 6km to and from Cascine Park. They have a market there every Tuesday morning and it's ridiculously cheap. I'm talking €5-10 (about $7-13) for a pair of knee-high leather boots. It's worth the walk and you won't find any tourists/English speaking people there.

-Thursday, I saw King David's penis. *giggle* Unfortunately, they don't let you take pictures but he only lives about a 5 minute walk from my apartment so I plan to go there again soon and sneak some. All joking aside, it's amazing to see Michaelangiolo's work. There's so much detail in every part of it and knowing what he wanted it to represent, it's fabulous to see it in person.

-Today (Friday), 2 of my roommates and I participated in Gimkhana, a scavenger hunt type of event around Florence that was held by my program. The winners got free sandwich vouchers for one of the best paninotecas in Firenze (haha. hey, that's less money I have to spend!). We were the only people out of several hundred in our program that showed up. We got about halfway through the list when we decided to stop the hunt and grab an espresso. We won by default.

-We were taught some self-defense moves by Italian men in shiny booty shorts today (I didn't realize it was still 1986). Uh, have you seen me? I'm basically defenseless and I'm pretty sure my fight-or-flight response would just be to have a slap fight with him.

-There's an artisanal chocolate festival in Florence that started today. It lasts until 2/13 but we went by today and it is AMAZING. A return visit is inevitable and it is so fabulous that it deserves its own blog entry (for another time, eh?)

-And to draw the week to a close, dancing Hare Krishnas.

Buona notte a tutti!
~Britt