Happy Presidents Day!

"Life is like a box of chocolates... you never know what you're gonna get." ~Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump in Forrest Gump (1994)

Midnight (between Feb 17 and Feb 18)

After Skyping with my mom last night, I got my stuff together to take a shower. I’ve been showering at night because I like to wash off the smoke smell from the streets  before going to bed. As I gathered a few things together, my computer began chiming again. It was Skype. I had an incoming call from our family friend Matt.

Matt lives in Rosenheim, Germany and has invited me to come see him and his wife for a weekend while I am over here. We chatted a bit about my trip so far and talked about making plans to get together soon. The Wi-Fi cut out at one point and it took me awhile to get it back.

“Well Happy Monday,” Matt said when it reconnected. I checked the time. It was after midnight. “It’s Presidents Day back home.” We laughed some more and talked some more before hanging up to go to bed. We decided to get in touch later in the week to figure out when I could make the trip to south Germany.

After I got out of the shower, I was craving chocolate. Back home, I eat ice cream every single night before I go to bed. I don’t just have a little serving of ice cream; I break the laws of physics cramming as much ice cream into a bowl as possible. My sweet tooth has been killing me since I got here, and an occasional cup of hot chocolate has done little to keep it happy. Come to think of it, the cocoa was the only European chocolate I’d had since my Toblerone bar back in Heathrow.

I decided to give in. I grabbed the few lose coins I had left and went out to the vending machine. I didn’t care if it was just M&Ms I wanted Chocolate!

I found the machine and surveyed my options. I had to chuckle a little when I saw that they had several types of beer available for sale in the machine. I found the row that had chocolate on it. They did have M&Ms, but they also had a few other brands whose labels I couldn’t read. I picked one of them, put in my money, and entering the code, watched my treat tumble down to the shoot.

I went back to my room and wrestled the purple wrapper off. The brand was “Milka” and according to the label it was made in Praha 8 (The 8^th district of Prague.) I bit into the bar. It wasn’t waxy like American chocolate, but rather a solid bar that cracked into my mouth. As it cracked off, the taste was amazing. It had whole hazelnuts in it that burst with flavor. The chocolate itself was rich. It wasn’t like some chocolate bars that make you thirsty as you eat them; rather, the flavor was intense but tasty at the same time.

As soon as I finished the chocolate bar (which wasn’t much more than a minute after I bought it) I wished I had never tried it. I loved it! Now I realized it was going to be hard to resist buying them all the time.

But with my craving satisfied, I went to bed, hoping to get enough sleep before my first day of school.