Day 15

This may have been my favorite day of the trip so far. To start things off right, I took a nap on the bus ride from Leysin to Broc. It was a lovely 45 minute power nap that energized me for the rest of the day. Our first stop was Callier's Chocolate Factory. It has apparently been redone since last year, and the tour felt very Disney-esque to me. They went through the history of chocolate, beginning with Quetzalcoatl in South America clear through the Callier's Nestle chocolate that I have grown to love over the last two weeks. We got to see chocolates in production and then sample every flavor we wanted. I think I overloaded, but it was divine. They were so delicious.

Our final stop was Gruyère. It's this adorable little town that still feels quite medieval and so quaint. We had time to play around there for a while. One of our assignments was at a Tibetan museum in an old Catholic church. Kind of a weird combination, but it was cool. Then we went to an HR Giger museum and I'm fairly sure that man was completely mentally unstable. We checked out the castle and they were having a medieval festival today so people were running around in old attire and it was pretty funny looking. They had a falconer with a bunch of chained birds (I was happy they were chained.... they didn't appear that way quite as much). They had a bunch of overpriced food that I passed on... It's like fair food... Just because it was there, they thought they could charge fifteen prices for it. One of my favorite parts of the day was a live version of PacMan that we played in one of the gardens. I got to be a cherry because I was wearing a pink shirt... I got eaten fairly early in the game. Someone got it on video... I'm sure it looked ridiculous but it was a blast. I had a chocolat crepe for lunch since that was one of the only things I could find without a line out the door. We shopped around for a while and I've pretty much completed my souvenir shopping, which is a very happy thing. I even bought myself something... a hat to cover up the disastrous hair days that are inevitable in this humidity. Speaking of humidity... we got caught in a downpour. For the first time in the full two weeks I've been here, I left my umbrella on the bus. Oh well. At least my hat covered up the resulting bad hair day.