Eighteen Pounds

"So, where do you live?"

"Near Waldenbuch. Do you know where the Ritter Sport factory is?"

My eyes went wide and a shot a look at Curtis that was unmistakable. Forget the rest of that conversation. We needed to go there.

It turns out the Ritter Sport factory is not too far from where we are living. An hour-long trip somewhere is close these days, mind you. As we were walking through the town, we started seeing large, colorful squares. A good sign that we were getting close! We found ourselves in front of a modern, square building, complete with colors. 

The Schokoladen features a chocolate exhibition upstairs and a chocolate shop downstairs. We started with the exhibition.

We walked into a dark room with three screens rolling beautiful footage of creamy chocolate. The film described the many steps it takes from harvesting cacao pods, to grinding cocoa powder, and to wrapping chocolate bars.

The perimeter of that room showed examples of some of the equipment from the film.

Sebastian's favorite part of the exhibition, however, was a small model of the Ritter Sport factory. If you press a small button, the factory lights up, shakes, and deposits a small square of chocolate into a sputtering little delivery truck. The truck makes its way around to the front of the factory and drops the chocolate through the prize door. 

Did I mention Sebastian loved this part?

Once Sebastian got used to the idea that colorful square wrapper equals delicious chocolate, he was more interested in the displays around the rest of the exhibition. These displays outlined the history of the Ritter Sport wrapper, advertisements, and success. Boring. Where's the real chocolate?

Here is it! Walk down stairs and you'll find aisles and shelves and rows of every chocolate flavor that Ritter Sport makes. At a discount, at that! We learned, however, that the real gem lies at the back of the store. They have broken and (not as beautiful) bagged sets of chocolate for an even greater discount.

We couldn't help ourselves. And neither could Sebastian, apparently.

Eighteen pounds? Oops. Will that be enough? We may never know.