And the streets were lined with chocolate

During the Euro Chocolate festival the streets of the city of Perugia were filled with stands selling chocolate in every form you can think of. I went to the festival with some of the other girls in my program along with a few thousand other people. The festival was packed, especially around the stands handing out free chocolate. In the middle of the street there were a string of huge chocolate carvings and as the sculptors carved off chunks they were handed out to the crowd. I unfortunately didn’t manage to get some of the shavings as I reached the front of the crowd just in time for their lunch break.

After walking around for a while we decided to grab some food not made of chocolate for lunch. We stood in the longest line ever to get a kebab, which are surprisingly common in Italy. After finally getting our lunch we wandered around some more and tried to find something to do. There were so many different kinds of chocolate and it was incorporated into everything including pasta, but here are only so many chocolate stands you can look at. There were a lot less free samples than I anticipated but I did have some amazing chocolate with chili powder in it. It sounds gross but really it was awesome and had a little kick.

While trying to get away from the crowds for a little we ended up just wandering randomly around Perugia and ran into some of Molly’s friends from school. We had a good chat and got some suggestions for dinner. It was a little colder than we expected so we decided to eat an early dinner and then head toward the bus station. We waited around at the bus station for about an hour and it was getting pretty close to the bus time but yet we were the only people there. We discovered that because it was Sunday the bus didn’t pick us up at the place it dropped us off so we ran onto a local but that took us to the train station. We thought we were cutting it close and when we arrived and saw no bus we got a little scared, but the bus was just late. The bus left almost 45 minutes late, but the driver was clipping down the road at a pretty good pace and we ended up back in Siena at about the same time as expected.