chocolate

Belgium is the country of chocolate, right? I wonder why. Coté d'Or, a company which I associate with excellent chocolate, isn't even Belgian anymore. It's part of a big evil American multinational named Kraft Food, which is part of an even bigger multinational (Altria) of which nobody has ever heard even though it seems to own half the world.
Leonidas, which creates great pralines, has a Greek name. And was started by a Greek. It's not owned by some baby-eating multinational, but it is almost one in its own right by now.

Anyway, the aisles of the Real supermarket close to my apartment were stacked full of chocolate. I've never seen so much chocolate ever before in a supermarket. I bought a small box Rausch mini-chocolates, with 80% cacao. They are de-li-ci-ous. Rausch is a small family company owned by some grandson of the guy who started it. Which is how every company creating delicious things should be.
I read about it (that's marketing for you) in the Mobil magazine which is produced by Deutsche Bahn as a monthly magazine to be read and taken for free on the train. As I traveled to Berlin by train (which is a long trip: from Brussels to Köln with the ICE and then from Köln over Hannover to Berlin - I took a regular intercity train for the rest of the trip, because the ICE for that stretch from Köln to Berlin was 30 euros more expensive) I had time on my hands and read parts of it, the vocabulary and sentences were quite easy.
Also, there were leaflets on the train detailing the entire trip, with information of the connections in every station, complete with departure times and boarding platform. Not just some crumpled, coffee-ring bearing piece of paper full of departure times for every day of the month, no: a brand new one for the trip on that time of the day only. Pretty impressive.
The train to Hannover had half an hour of delay though. I thought that was impossible in Germany, but it happened anyway. And the train to Berlin had delay as well.