We awoke quite refreshed after a cracking sleep made possible with a fan in the room. Glorious, glorious cool air blasting on us throughout the night. They even provided ear plugs so we could sleep through the street noise. Everything you need to sleep when the air is lava and Switzerland are playing a World Cup match. Anyway! After subjecting my beloved to dairy products yesterday I pretty much went and did it again today, but this time she was a willing participant in the slow annihilation of her digestive system.

Today we went to the Lindt Home of Chocolate and this is the most important thing to happen on this holiday. It’s fucking brilliant. The first thing you see when you walk through the door is, apparently, the tallest free-standing chocolate fountain in the world at 9.3 metres. You can’t go all Augustus Gloop on it though, it’s not for drinking, but it’s real chocolate. 1400 kilograms of the stuff is pumped through the fountain. It’s a thing of beauty. Next you head up some stairs and grab your audio guide, then you’re through the turnstile.

You’re then shown the beginnings of how chocolate is processed. Firstly you’ve got to grow the stuff and Lindt get a lot of their cocoa beans from Ghana. They explained how the little baby cocoa trees are grown in nurseries before they’re taken out into the field and planted underneath their very own banana tree for shade. That sounds like a fuck tonne of effort when you’re busy producing 20% of the world’s cocoa beans. Fortunately cocoa trees sprout pods full of beans whenever they damn well feel like it, there’s no specific harvest season. They sprout them anywhere they please too. They grow directly out of the trunk rather than at the end of a branch. There’s a whole load of drying and fermenting to be done before they’re shipped off to be made into something you’d want to put in your mouth.

Then you move on to learn about the history of chocolate all the way back to the Olmecs, Mayans and Aztecs. The beans were used as currency and it was consumed as a bitter drink. Then the Spanish rocked up and took it back to Europe but obviously the Europeans weren’t going to go for it without it being pumped full of sugar. It was a rich person’s beverage for a while, then as production became more efficient and cheaper even the Great Unwashed were able to get their grubby little mitts on it.

Aaaanyway, the next room takes you through the history of chocolate production in Switzerland which is actually a lot more interesting than it sounds. There’s a lot to learn but the most relevant was the fact Rodolphe Lindt invented the conching technique, quite by accident. Apparently all of his attempts at making something so fucking delicious that you make sex noises as soon as it hits your tongue were going utterly tits up and he was left with a gritty mess. Then he left the mixer on and fucked off for the weekend and when he returned he was met with a gorgeous, smooth chocolate. The chocolate that me know and love much to the chagrin of my waistline.

Yes yes, this is all very interesting. But then. THEN! You go into a room with three chocolate fountains; dark, milk, and white. You can grab a spoon and help yourself and no one stops you helping yourself to as much as you want. Like, I feel like if you lay down underneath it and pumped it directly into your facehole they might draw a line but as far as I could tell the only rules were “antibac your hands and use a fresh spoon every time”. Oh my. This is the best place in the world. It was fucking divine.

There were other things in this room too but I don’t really recall what on account of the fact on the other side of said room were big columns full of chocolate bars. You wave your hand underneath and a little machine breaks a bit off for you and spits it into your hand. I set my audio guide off and, as it invited us to do exactly what I’d just done, I shovelled the chocolate piece into my chops. “But don’t eat it just yet…” it purred. Oh. Turns out these chocolates are all flavoured and they want you to feel the texture and savour the smell and all that. Never mind, again, you can have as much as you want. You can cram orangey chocolate into you gob until your teeth hurt and tourists look on in horror.

But then. THEN! You walk into a room with eight vats of truffles, all different flavours, and you can have one of each! They do monitor this but honestly mate, eight Lindt truffles is pretty much the entrance fee reclaimed right there. We shoved them into pockets and just accepted they’d be pools of stickiness by the time we got to them. Then you’re given a Lindt square from a machine. And once you’re done you hand your audio guide in, enter the gift shop, and they GIVE YOU ANOTHER FUCKING TRUFFLE! I reiterate; this is the best place in the world. I never want to leave. But I have to leave because I can’t survive off chocolate alone and I also feel like the staff would have something to say if the museum was suddenly inhabited by a golem-like lesbian hissing at guests, yelling at them to stay away from the precioussssss.

We didn’t have to be at the airport until later and it was hotter than the devil’s arsehole, so we hopped on a boat back into the city and wandered back to Rheinfelder Bierhalle to have another Möhl. We grabbed some food too because it doesn’t matter how expensive a city is, it’ll never be as expensive as a sad-looking airport sandwich. I had Wiedikerli which is a pork sausage made in Zürich thus satisfying my desire for local food and my love of sausage. Not a euphemism.

So yeah, nice one, Zürich. I’d like to come back and see the Grossmünster once it’s been refurbished and the scaffolding is down. I would also like to consume my body weight in cheese but I’m guessing I can do that anywhere in Switzerland. Just need a small lottery win then maybe we can afford three or four days in the country.

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Zürich, Switzerland

Stayed at: SleepandGo, Zürich Altstadt

Useful shit to know…

• We bought the Zürich Card for travel on all public transport.
• It cost CHF29 each for 24 hours.
• As well as free transit on all of the city’s buses, trams, trains and boats, it gives you discounts on many attractions.

• There are buses to Lindt Home of Chocolate, but there’s also a boat you can take from Zürich Bürkliplatz (See) to Kilchberg ZH (See). It’s covered by your Zürich Card.
• If you don’t have a Zürich Card you can use the SBB app to book train, bus and ferry tickets.

• I would, if I were you, book your tickets for Lindt Home of Chocolate online a couple of weeks in advance.
• You can buy them on the day but you might not get a time slot straight away and you’ll have to wait. You also risk there being no availability.
• Tickets are CHF17 each and I think this is well worth it.

• The language in Zürich is Swiss German, but I believe standard German is also understood. We found English to be widely spoken.
• The currency is Swiss Francs.