Yesterday I forgot to tell you about the reason I have so much free time to visit all of Lyon with my parents - every french student has a week of holidays, called "Congés". This means that a lot of INSA students are away and some shops are closed because the owners are away with their families. Today is Halloween, and it's actually quite sweet because a lot of scarily dressed-up children are running around the streets with their parents to gather treats - at least in Croix-Rousse they don't knock at your door, but at the shops which are almost all open until 7pm or later. In my opinion, this is a much better model than in Austria, because this way it's a two way exchange - the children get the sweets and the shopkeepers have the parents looking at their wares. In Austria it's usually just people complaining about how annoying teens gathering sweets are and how it's an American tradition we don't want to subscribe to. 

In the morning, to go back in time, we went to the chocolate museum, called MUSCO (musée de chocolat). It's a bit outside of Lyon, in the suburbs, so going down from Croix-Rousse we had to travel a bit to get there. A great idea would have been to look up the bus timetables beforehand, since we had to wait quite a while at the metro station for the bus to arrive. The good news was that the museum is still in the area covered by TCL, so we could use our 72h tickets! On a side note, if you decide to get a weekly ticket, you actually have to go to Part-Dieu and get a plastic card (5€) with your photo on it, which in my opinion just isn't worth it. 

Once we arrived at the museum I was quite glad to get out of the just drizzling, but very annoying rain. The section with information on the history and production is a bit small, but very informative, and they have loads of different chocolate products to try! I even skipped lunch because I had so much chocolate ... One thing I didn't realise was that dark chocolate can have so many different flavours depending on the variety of bean and country. There are three different main types of chocolate bean, with Criollo (which I beforehand had just thought a crispy variety) being a rare one that represents only 5% of the total worldwide output. The chocolatier who founded the museum makes artisanal chocolates, which means a non-industrial approach and a bean-to-bar production. Tasting different chocolates with the same percentage, e.g. 76%, I found them to be vastly differing in undertones and sweetness. As I said in one of my last posts on silk, most times quality is better than quantity and at least for me personally, I'd rather have artisanal chocolate fewer times a month than the supermarket variety every day.