Chocolat

Believe the hype: Max Brenner's is awesome. I mean, it is a little silly--the whole "chocolate culture" involve-all-the-senses glorification of their featured ingredient inspires some eye-rolling--but one sip of my choconut martini and I was sold.

Actually. If I were allowed one more tiny nitpick, it would be the service.

Our waiter was attentive and polite and all, but Melissa and I found our jaws on the floor over and over throughout the evening. It began when Melissa asked what the soup of the day was. "Oh, God," he said, and began hemming and hawing.

"It's okay if you need to go check; there's no rush," she assured him.

"No, I know what it is! I know what it is, I just hate saying it, because I hate this soup."

Oh.

"It's corn chowder. And, I mean, it's good and all, but I found out something about corn chowder recently, so now I hate it. I found out something was in it that I didn't know was in it."

"Bacon," I guessed. I mean, it wasn't a guess. Mary, I'm not trying to generalize or stereotype, but sometimes you really can tell.

"Yes!" he squeaked. "I just like it so much better when they have a really good soup, like broccoli and cheddar! Mmmmm." I am not making this up.

Deciding that it was just a charming quirk, I asked for a recommendation once I had narrowed the drink choices down to two. I knew that there was something off when he suggested one over the other because it was "too cold for a frozen drink" (they were both frozen), but I diplomatically held up my menu and pointed out the two possibilities.

"So wait, what's in those?" he asked, leaning closer. If I wanted a recommendation from someone who had never tried the drinks, I would take a recommendation from myself. "Ew, I don't like any of those things in there," he announced. "I mean, do you?"

In the grand scheme of things, it didn't even seem like such a big deal when he carefully set knives on napkins for each of us--and walked off with our forks. The additional squeaking when we pointed this out (after our forkless salads had arrived) was harder to ignore.

But look, the place was lovely. It smells better than Hershey Park, and the chocolate is the best I have had in this country. I mean, it's entirely sweet, but somehow it is not too much--it is balanced admirably against itself somehow. And their drink menu could keep me going there for months just to try...if that were an option.

"Don't you think you're being a little silly?" Nick asks, referring to the other half of my round-trip ticket. It is dated May 31st. The thing is that it doesn't feel like a round-trip. It feels like when my last graduation date was racing toward me, or like my mother described when she was planning her wedding. You don't think about the next day; there is no next Thursday, next week, next month. There is just a date when everything stops, and you are shocked to remember that the sun will rise the next morning, or that your heart will still remember how to beat.

On the other hand, both halves of my ticket include more than an hour each in Zurich. That can be a thing to focus my mind on, a mnemonic to ensure that I remember that time will continue in a linear and orderly fashion--because at the end of May, I will get to add one more country's chocolate into my comparison base.