Happy Chocolate Day! (AKA Valentine's Day)

So, when I was little, Valentine's Day was awesome. In elementary school, valentines were expected. Everyone brought enough to give the whole class. You would make yourself a giant envelope and each student would go around dropping their valentines into the envelopes. The valentines included some kind of candy 99.9% of the time.

Yeah. It was a pretty good day.

Well, when I got older, that tradition became less common, mostly because the whole elementary tradition developed a "childish" connotation. (Not to me of course. Sugar is always acceptable).

I still believe the holiday is about chocolate and all other kinds of sugar. So, taking advantage of the abundance of amazing sweets in Italy, I decided to only eat sweets today. Don't worry, my tummy is trained to live on only ganache and buttercream. It can handle anything.

Breakfast: a chocolate croissant.

Mid-morning snack: candied orange rind dipped in chocolate.

Look! You can see the orange! This counts as a serving of fruit, right?

Lunch: gelato.

Nocciola--hazelnut and biscotto--sort of cookie flavored with hunks of cookie in it.

Late afternoon snack: not really sure what these are. They came from a very classic bakery in Modena.

This was not my favorite. I think the cake layers were soaked in some kind of liquor (they do that a lot here).

This was very yummy. Still not sure what it is. It has a kind of crumbly crust and a chocolate-y filling.

Break from the sugar. My awesome Italian teacher helped me get one of those machines that boils water so I could have tea. Yay! I had missed my daily tea time.

Back to sugar.

Dinner: chocolate.

This is nocciolata fondente. Dark chocolate with hazelnuts.

Vanilla-flavored chocolate.

Coffee-falvored chocolate.

Zabaglione-flavored chocolate.

Dessert: This entire jar of nutella.

Just kidding! This jar should last me at least two days.

Other things about today:

In the Piazza Grande, they have begun setting up for the Chocolate Fair that starts tomorrow and goes until Sunday.

Some random political activist handed me a rose.

I got three letters from my mommy.

The people at the desk downstairs love me. Actually, they think I'm really weird. Getting all of these letters covered in puppy and kitty stickers must make me seem more normal...

-Meri