la dolce vita: i will never eat chocolate again

When I heard the words “Europe’s largest chocolate festival”, I knew that this was the place for me. So I set a whole day aside to go check out this chocolate extravaganza - you know, just to make sure these guys were truly worthy of this self-proclaimed reputation (mine are the only standards that matter) - and fasted for three days so that I might gorge myself with as much chocolate as humanly possible. I joke only about the former part of that last clause. When I disembarked from the train in Perugia with several of my friends, the city appeared to be in a state of sheer chaos. Cacao, or the prospect of it at least, has a way of driving people mad, and I was no exception to this rule. I quickly tore through the crowds, weaving in and out of less important people, dodging giant bodies that didn’t need the chocolate as much as I did, and throwing little old ladies to the outskirts of the mob. And somehow along the way, Jessica and I managed to get entirely separated from our group of 150 people on the Florence for Fun tour and miss our bus. Nice goin guys. Yet driven entirely by instinct, we quickly hopped on to the next bus we saw and prayed that it might take us towards the chocolate. It was only when I saw the reflection of the bus in a store window that I was able to make out the fact that we were headed in the right direction. And lo and behold, we jumped right off the bus and into the welcoming arms of our four other friends not 15 minutes later. (That whole episode was quite strange, to be honest.) The day began with me downing an entire box of Choco Vitamins. I have a feeling I was supposed to space those out over several days, but I was pumped about getting the Chocofest started and this happened to be my very first “choco” for the day. Alright, I’m gonna stop with all the chocolate puns right now because this is getting old even for me. Trust that they’re still here in spirit. Now I’m just going to tell you now that this festival was not quite what I had expected. There were no chocolate eating contests (I would have dominated), over-the-top chocolate sculptures, or even chocolate wrestling tournaments. The large part of the fair was made up of booths for different companies to hawk their chocolate wares. The eating insane amounts of chocolate part came in with all the free samples. And the other ways in which we were able to work the chocolate system… (I’m doing it again, I apologize.)

Our first stop was this underground network type thing in Perugia. First we visited a chocolate exhibition. Boring. Who wants to shuffle like a bunch of idiots through a little educational tour on chocolate? That’s right – losers. I was there to experience my first heart attack, so Jessica, Erica, and I quickly bailed and found the hot chocolate stand. But as luck would have it, they had just run out, and had to make a new batch. They still had a bunch of the Cioccolato Caldo Pepperoncino – Spicy Hot Chocolate – something which I just wasn’t feeling right then. Something which I’ll probably never feel. So we literally stood around waiting for this freakin hot chocolate juice to get hot for a good half hour. The lady kept telling us “5 more minutes”, and we eventually reached the point where to give up on waiting for the stuff would have been to undermine our entire time standing there thus far. I’m not going into the outcome of this little incident, because all that need be said is that the stuff was completely unworthy. We were far less than pleased. Our next stop was the “Lindt Snap!” stand, the point of this activity being to put on a blind fold and try chocolate in the dark to heighten your other senses to the chocolate experience. They even gave us canes to use in the dark, but the bastards wouldn’t let us keep them afterwards. And unfortunately, they gave us terrible directions; whereas we thought that we were supposed to pick up the different types of chocolate at various points along the hallway and enter a room to conduct the taste test at the end, we were actually supposed to have tasted the chocolate along the way. Unfortunately for those Lindt people, we all stuffed our bags with as much of their delicious chocolate as we could carry. So it was fine.

Next we decided to step into the light of day, where we continued to collect even more free chocolate with our special Eurochocolate cards (one of the perks of the FFF group), see the world’s largest chocolate bar – 11 meters squared – and pretend we were interested clients at each of the booths so that the people working them might give us more free chocolate. We also got free Coke Zero (this Coke promo is everywhere in Italy, by the way), iced tea, and bottles of brandy. Sadly, Erica peaked early in the day and had to cut herself off from the chocolate festivities. Jessica and I, however, forged on. We visited more stands, went through a little chocolate mini-tour, and made some new friends. I bonded with two Perugian boys in the early afternoon by letting them listen to awesome songs on my iPod. The event unfolded after they asked me some question about Guns ‘N Roses, after which I had them listening to some more epic bands. They should have known that they had opened the floodgates with me when it came to music. And I should have known that I too had opened the floodgates by naively befriending two young Italian gentlemen. After considerable efforts, we were finally able to part ways, shortly after which Jessica had to throw in the towel with all this chocolate business. My friends were dropping like flies. The true champ (me) proceeded to guzzle down another cup of hot chocolate - white hot chocolate this time - work the booths for yet more free samples, try some chocolate covered churos, take a spin on the merry-go-round, and join a chocolate choir, because apparently it reached the point where I had to sing for my goods.

I’ll stop narrating and post the pics.

Erica on the train to Perugia right before she passed out.

Jessica, Anna, Paige, and Natalie.

Erica and I pissed off at the hot chocolate stand because it took so damn long.

me and my free stuff.

crowds in perugia. my favorite part of this picture has to be the guy wearing the "playboy" shirt.

the chocolate started getting to our heads.

example of a chocolate booth.

example of another chocolate booth.

the mad hatter.

she took the chocolate pretty hard.

we are god.

ok, now we are really god.

the guy in the background would not stop taking pictures of himself. i tried to get one of him standing up holding the camera low and taking one up at his blue steel face, but i couldn't bust the camera out quick enough. i guess i'm giving him too much in posting him online, but oh well. you had to see what a dick he was.

"dammi, oh bello, il tuo cioccolatino." these are the words i sang in my choir of fellow chocolate lovers.

erica got caught up in a crowd of people jumping for pieces of chocolate. this was after she had gotten hit in the face by an old lady with a bag of oranges.