Chocolate Buzz & Children's Museum

Wednesday afternoon (23 September), all 10 of us (the 6 students, Julie--the other faculty member—Glenn, Amelia and I) went to Planete Chocolat, one of the four chocolate makers in Brussels. We had to pass Mannequin Pis (the pee-pee boy) on the way, one of the most popular (but overrated) sites in the city, so I'm including pictures of him too. He is dressed in the garb of a different country or culture every day. What a wardrobe! Since this isn't really research, see the Wikipedia entry for the skinny on the pee pee boy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manneken_Pis#History_and_legends.

Mannequin Pis has so many admirers daily, it's hard to get a good look at him some days. And despite what most visitors expect, he is a very little boy.

At Planete Chocolat, we learned about the ingredients for their chocolate (and there are very few), the process by which they get cocoa to Belgium, we got to mix the chocolate, learned what temperatures chocolate needs for melting, cooling, and hardening to a shiny finish. We also got to make several batches in molds and learn about the different flavors they use. We should all keep our day jobs; I’m sure they threw our pitiful efforts back into the vats when we left.

Many times we heard the refrain that if a certain imperfection happens to the chocolate, “it would be fine to eat, but this we would not sell.” Planete Chocolat is very generous with samples during the lesson, so by the end, we were all buzzing from chocolate.

We watched a film about where the cocoa beans come from and how they get processed into cocoa oil, powder and other products . . . and they gave us hot chocolate to drink while we watched, as if we hadn’t already had more than Americans, who rarely get REAL chocolate, can handle! We sloshed out of there and on to the Brussels Children’s Museum.

Planete Chocolat made an impression on us, but the Tigers have left their impression on Planete Chocolate as well. This is a tiger paw chocolate they make in honor of all of the students who study at Clemson University Brussels Center and visit the shop.

After you’ve been Charlotte’s Discovery Place Museum, Atlanta’s Georgia Aquarium and road tested children’s museums all over the U.S., the Musee des Enfants was quite disappointing. It’s in a rambling old house, has many exhibits that aren’t really interactive, and although the website makes it sound like a trilingual museum, it isn’t really. The focal exhibit was “Rouge”—many aspects of the color red. Speakers of French and Dutch or Flemish have plenty to see and do, but speakers of English have a harder time. And Amelia, who isn’t reading English well yet, was underwhelmed. But since I took the students there to evaluate this museum as an examination of what this museum say about what Belgians think their children will enjoy vs. what American children’s museums say about what Americans think their children will enjoy, they found plenty to write about.

At the end of our time there, Amelia went to a “cookery class,” and although the teacher spoke no English, she was very animated and made herself understood. Since I’m studying French, it was excellent for me; as the teacher spoke to the children, she spoke slowly enough that I could follow. Amelia enjoyed the peach crumble she made and bowed out with an earnest “merci beaucoup.”