The one requirement of me being allowed to travel to Brussels on my own for FOSDEM (Post about fosdem to follow) is that I bring back Belgium Chocolate. "Easy enough", I hear you say, however; you don't know my fussy wife. ๐
There are loads of shops selling all sorts of weird and wonderful chocolate products. Some are high-end outlets like the one above in the Galeries Royales Saint Hubert, then there are some that I admit do look a bit cheap and nasty. when I sent the photo below to my daughter, she said, "Looks like an ALDI shop me!" which is code for "Don't you buy me anything from there!"
TBH, there was no way I was going to buy from that "Stack'em high, sell'em cheap" shop. If you look closely at the picture, you'll notice they do bundles of boxes; for example, five boxes for โฌ9.90. Sounds like a right bargain, doesn't it? But that's five boxes of the same chocolate! But more importantly, a single box of hand-picked individual chocolates starts at โฌ10, โฌ15 and โฌ20, which should tell you that 'quality' might be the defining factor with the El Cheapo outlets.
Call me a romantic fool, but I was looking for a heart-shaped box for the wife, but the shop owners know this, and many of them were well overpriced.
This shop had one for โฌ21 (Similar to the heart box on the right); the problem was it wasn't very big, and it felt like most of that price was taken up with the leather box it came in.
The shops do slabs of chocolate, and you can get messages written on them. I saw one shop that just sold chocolate lollipops, they all had different flavours, but it was still essentially chocolate on a bit of wood. ๐คฃ ๐ซ
Then there are the shops that sell macaroons. Now the missus luuurves ,them, but what would be the point of buying something she can get at the local supermarket? I bought her a good-sized box from Leonidas and then a bag of hand-picked (by me) chocolates from another shop further along.
Some, but not all, the shops did not put what is in the chocolates in English on the identification cards, which are mostly written in Flemish. You can work out some things like Truffles or caramel, but for the vast majority, I didn't have a clue what was in there; you can ask the staff. Most of them speak English, but when you're faced with row upon row of individual chocolates, I couldn't face two hours of me asking: "And what's in this one?" and I doubt neither could the poor woman behind the counter, I suspect.
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