For the first few weeks I searched long and hard but wasn't able to find any dark chocolate in Eastern Europe. There are 1,000 kinds of milk chocolate bars in the stores, with nuts and fruits and caramel and everything you can imagine except for cocoa. I forced myself to eat some, as chocolate is a staple for every backpacker. It stores well (when it's not too hot), is compact, and is a great energy lift during a long journey without food. Most people can only eat either milk or dark chocolate. Dark chocolate satisfies me quickly so I don't have to eat a bunch of it, plus I'm convinced that it's healthy for people to eat it. I was making my way to Greece and once again disappointed with the chocolate selection in the stores. As a bus I was riding slammed to a halt, the bag of a backpacker seated behind me fell to the floor and a few things fell out of his bag. I turned around and helped him pick his things up, and there, I noticed that a chocolate bar had fallen out of his bag. It was partially eaten and unwrapped, so the actual chocolate was on the floor of the bus, out of its wrapper, with no protection from whatever was dragged onto the bus from people's feet after using really substandard toilets. I noticed the color of it and asked, "hey man, is that dark chocolate?" He said "yeah, do you want some?"
I had waited for this moment, and it was great, even as I thought about what could have come into contact with it on the floor as I let it dissolve in my mouth.
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Some of us are still on the inside and occasionally allow ourselves a brief second to contemplate the outside. Today, the sun finally showed itself after days and days of rain. After work, I went for a lazy jog around Old Town and thought about my friend Boz. I miss him. I thought what could he possibly be up to at this moment? What corner of the world is he in? All this work and life stuff on the inside has gotten in the way of tracking Boz around the globe. I finally found the ZenBoz Blog and was not suprised to find out that my old friend was up to his old ways...searching...for dark chocolate. We have dark chocolate on the inside, but something tells me it tastes a bit better on the outside.
There is a lesson in here, bro. Sometimes what we are looking for falls into our lap, and when it does, we can't refuse it because we don't like the package it arrived in.
As some of us begin to prepare for another hot and humd 4th of July here in the grand ole US of A, complete with bbq and fireworks, I also wondered what Boz might be up to far off in uncharted lands... wondering if he's going to get some fresh corn on the cob or maybe find some old lady to bake him up some pie. Well, I guess some half eaten chocolate off the putrid floor of a bus that fell out of another guy's pack will just have to be close enough...eat well Boz, eat well...
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