German chocolates

Being in Germany is like being a kid in a candy store -- something that I actually have experience with.
I got my first full-time job at a candy store in late 1993, about six months after high-school graduation. This was back before I moved to Hawaii -- while I was going to community college in Lake County, Illinois.

The store I worked at sold a wide variety of stuff -- gummies, jelly beans, licorice, etc -- but the best-selling items were the chocolates. One of the best aspects of the job was that you had to test the products for freshness, and there was nothing I liked better than taste-testing the Lindt chocolate balls.

Back then, we only had three flavors -- dark chocolate (blue wrapper), milk chocolate (red wrapper), and white chocolate (gold wrapper). For a long time, I thought those were the only kinds of products Lindt ever made.

Not so.
As I've learned from walking around ordinary grocery stores in Germany, that is definitely NOT the case. Here, there are entire sections dedicated solely to Lindt chocolates of every conceivable variety. It's amazing -- cognac, cherry, plum, 60% cacao, 70% cacao, raspberry panna cotta, hazelnut, almond, creme brulee, and mocha, just to name A FEW.

It has been an eye-opening experience. Sometimes, you don't realize how limited your understanding is until you're exposed to something bigger. For me, this is just the most recent example.