And when I say in the mountains, I mean in the mountains. This is what we saw when we got there:
Not bad for a small town, huh?
The main building of the chocolate factory is, in itself, fairly unassuming. Compared to the palace that is the Uni Bern Hauptgebäude, most people probably wouldn't give it a second look.
Then we went inside...
The Louis Cailler factory gift shop if a teenage girl's dream. Walls upon walls upon walls of chocolate bars. Big baskets and tins of chocolate. Fancy chocolate. Cheep chocolate. Fruity, nutty, healthy chocolate. Chocolate filled with liquer. Dark chocolate. Super dark chocolate. So-dark-they-use-it-as-a-background-motif-in-a-gothic-novel chocolate. Chocolate themed hats, postcards, and books. Hundreds of wrappers of all colours, sparkling like Christmas tree lights under the pale shop fluorescence.
Yeah. I like chocolate. Can you tell?
Anyway, as this trip was sponsored by my German class and thus supposedly educational, the first item on the day's agenda was a tour of the chocolate factory. As the only factory tour I'd ever attended before was a tour of a toilet-production centre, I really wasn't sure what to expect.
And nothing could have prepared me for what we actually got.
The tour of the chocolate factory reminded me a bit of a Disney World ride. Our class was carefully queued up in hallway filled with Cailler-related paraphernalia. Once everyone was accounted for, the hostess pressed a button on the wall and a mysterious door opened up into a small, dark room. We were all quickly herded inside. As the doors began to shut, I noticed the decorations on the walls: cave paintings, set into tiles designed to look like chocolate. As the doors shut, a recorded voice boomed out from a hidden speaker overhead.
As the voice was speaking German, I really don't remember much of what it had to say. All I do know is that it was related to the history of chocolate.
As the voice continued to speak, I became gradually aware of a sinking feeling--we were in a sort of large, very slow elevator. When the mysterious voice overhead had finished it's spiel, the movement stopped and the opposite side of the wall opened wide.
We were next ushered into a rainforest, complete with recorded bird noises and an Aztec shrine. The voice overhead then began to regale us with (still entirely German) tales of the god (or possibly completely regular bloke) Chocolatyl. As it spoke, the shrine lit up, at the fake birdsongs changed to fake chanting.
When the voice described the fall of Chocolatyl and the rise of the conquistadors, an animatronic suit of armor in the corner lit up, making vague hacking motions with its axe. When the voice described the transfer of chocolate into the Old World, a door in the wall opened and we were hurried into the belly of a Spanish trading ship. Somehow, from there we sailed straight into the bedchamber of Marie Antoinette. Our journey was, all the while, accompanied by cheesy sound effects, light effects, animations, and my friend the mysterious voice.
Eventually, with purchasing of the Cailler company by Nestle, the history portion of our tour ceased. We reached a large room filled with bags of cacao beans and nuts.
This is where the sampling portion of our tour began. We were free to taste whatever we wanted.
The hazelnuts were good. Eating raw cacao beans was...an interesting experience which I have never before had the privilege to obtain. It's also an experience which I am not likely to willingly subject myself to again.
Beyond the supply room lay a small conveyor belt. Through the glass panels in the wall, we could watch chocolate branches (a common form of chocolate candy over here--basically chocolate-coated softer chocolate) being produced. It reminded me a bit of the doughnut machine at Krispy Kreme.
Here we see the soft gooey nougat-y bits going through a chocolate waterfall:
Here we see them baking on the line:
Here we see the robotic arm which pulls them lickedy-split off the conveyor belt (sorry for the bad shot, but no lie, the thing was moving fast):
At the end of the line, there's a bowl of the finished product, fresh off the line and still slightly melty. I think I had about three of these little guys:
But they weren't the best part.
From the mini-factory room, we were admitted into a bigger room where we could see a map of the factory and a view of (a corner) of the factory floor. Viewers could press buttons on the map and screens on the wall would light up, showing video of what occurred in each corresponding area. Not as exciting as a real factory tour, but hey, still pretty cool. But then
BUT THEN
We were released...into...THE TASTING ROOM!
The tasting room is chocoholic Narnia. In the tasting room, pretty much every chocolate produced in the factory, from the 3 franc kiddy chocolates to the fancy ambassador chocolates that cost more than a small island, is out on display and ready for the tasting.
More chocolate than you can imagine. More chocolate than you can eat. Hazelnut chocolates, coffee chocolates, caramels, and delicately-shaped little cremes, cups and squares and plain old bars, all out for grabs. All out for FREE.
I'm not sure I've ever eaten so much chocolate in my life. EVERYTHING I tried was amazing--and I only tried maybe half the things.
Our group had fifteen minutes in the tasting room before we had to catch the train. We wound up literally running to catch it.
And on the ride home, we all had very sore stomachs.
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