Eurochocolate... sounds yummy doesn't it?

I headed out to a town called Perugia today where every year they have a 10 day festival called Eurochocolate. I seen it on the FlorenceForFun website and I decided to sign up. I was also taking pictures for them while I was there today which then gave me a huge discount on my day ticket...free! :)

The train ride was long (about 2.5hrs) and we arrived in Perugia around 10:30. I had 6 hours to take some pictures, try a bunch of chocolate and take in my chocolate experience. I definitely have some good and some bad things about today, which of course I will share.

Lets start with the bad (just to get it out of the way). It was so crazy crowded with people. Now I don't mean people standing in line waiting, I mean 100 people all pushing and shoving their way to the front of the Lindt chocolate line up just to get a free chocolate. It was Crazy!!! Now, I need to interject here to say that yes, I was also in the line up/chaos to get one of these free chocolates, but COME ON, do you blame me?!? This was the same scenario at every booth and it didn't get any better as the day went on. The other bad thing was that I was trying to find some chocolate bars here that have a soft creamy caramel center and that is IMPOSSIBLE! I was told by many vendor people today that that's just the way it is in Italy. They have hard caramel and chocolate that tastes like caramel but no soft caramel center bars. Sigh...

Ok, now on to the good! There was about 30 booths all with chocolate in them you could buy. It was crazy! You can buy pasta that tastes like chocolate (which I did), you can get liqueurs that taste like chocolate and you can buy pretty much every type of chocolate and thing mixed with chocolate you could think of (except caramel). ;-) When we first arrived, our tour leaders gave us a card that entitled us to discounts on chocolate as well as free items at various booths throughout. This part was pretty cool as about every second booth was giving out free samples of something. Mmmmm C-H-O-C-O-L-A-T-E!!!! The first booth I squished my way up to had hot chocolate but very soon I realized that everyone was eating it with a spoon. I then found out that this is how Italians have hot chocolate. They eat it with a spoon because it has the consistency of pudding. After eating my pudding/hot chocolate, I made my way to the next booth and just kept on snacking all the way down the line.

I did however, stop and have an actual lunch because I thought that chocolate for lunch and possibly supper would be a bit much for me for one day and I was right. By the time I got back on the train to go home, I think I had consumed about 3 chocolate bars (which doesn't sound like much but it really was) and hadn't even touched the chocolate that I bought for me to eat. oh well... more for me to eat another day I guess. ;)