Chocolate and Cheese, in Copious Quantities

It is Monday evening here in France and I am beat, all this sunshine really takes it out of you. Highlights of last week included a school trip to a little village in Switzerland called Guyere where we hit the highlights of Switzerland, first a tour of a cheese factory followed shortly after by tour of a chocolate factory. Despite the rain and dreariness of the day, we enjoyed the outing nonetheless.

The cheese factory was, honestly, kind of disgusting. Granted, it was fascinating to see how all these ridiculous amounts of cheese the French and Swiss eat are made, but seeing huge tubs of churning premature cheese, and rows and rows of cheese wheels aging up to 12 months? Not what I want to look at all day, frankly. We all got a sample at the end of the tour which I made myself try just for the cultural experience. I tried a bit of 6 month, 8 month, and 10 month aged cheese. Each had its own distinct and increasingly stronger flavor, and I actually did prefer it to the cheese back home, if I were to eat cheese at all.

We had lunch in the village and a bit of free time to see the chateau or the town. Leah, Stephen, Sarah, and I opted for eating lunch just outside the chateau and spending the rest of our dreary free time in a little café which reeked of the local specialty made into two classic dishes, raclettes and fondue.

After that it was on to the chocolate factory where we saw a bit of the history of chocolate and how it was made before ending with the highlight of the tour that we had all been looking forward to- the free samples. There were displays after displays of various assortments of chocolate that you could endlessly test. White chocolate, dark chocolate, milk chocolate, chocolate with nuts, chocolate with coffee, chocolate with nugget, you name it they had it. Needless to say, we consumed a large amount of chocolate in a very small amount of time and left with very unhappy stomachs, as you can see from Leah's face, but it was so worth it.