chocolate win and jewish fail...then win

A few recent highlights:

On Monday, Cristine and I went to the London Chocolate Festival - aka the best idea anyone has ever had ever.

Chocolate! Free samples!

There were about 20 booths from different chocolate shops throughout England, all of them showing some seriously impressive displays of chocolate and offering some seriously impressive displays of free samples.

Chocolate shoes!

In addition to the booths, there were also "tutored tastings" or demonstrations every hour - we got to try and learn about a range of South American chocolates, and learn how to make raw chocolate "on the hob." Brilliant!

On what would turn out to be a completely different note, Mitch and I found a chabad house in South Kensington to go to for a passover seder Monday night. Neither of us were particularly jazzed about the evening, but we had to be good jews and better to have an uncomfortable passover than none at all.

False. The evening started out with us showing up at the rabbi's house when the seder was actually elsewhere, the hurried and half-dressed rabbi mistaking us for a married couple, and the evening only got more awkward from there.

The seder was enormous, and held in a college auditorium. The seder plates hardly deserved to be called seder plates - plastic plates with some lettuce and a questionable item as shank bone thrown on entirely unceremoniously. The prayers were mumbled through in typical Jewish fashion (with an odd moment of repeating the four questions twice...for no apparent reason). A mere 45 minutes later, the most poorly organized system for distributing food began, and we realized the telling of the story of passover had been completely neglected. Flipping through our haggadahs, we couldn't find it anywhere. The blatantly nervous rabbi hadn't failed to accompany the eating of the hillel sandwich with the full history of the etymology of the word sandwich, but not once was it explained why we're all being forced to eat matzo in the first place. To top off the bizarre evening, the vegetarian entree of the evening was half an avocado. You could have roasted potatoes, beets, and half an avocado. Really?

But it's okay, because last night Mitch and I decided to set things aright Jew-wise. We took a field trip to a Sainsbury's in a Jewish area, stocked up on kosher food, and got all the fixings for a proper passover feast. The rest of the day was spent in a manner that would make any jewish grandmother proud, making the flat kitchen smell like a jewish home with homemade chicken soup and other various dishes. Also, we encountered a Swede.

No, not that kind

That kind

Apparently, here in Britishland, eggplants = aubergines, cucumbers = courgettes, and rutabagas = swedes. Fun fact for you.

After finding a haggadah online and making this seder plate

This seder plate is, believe it or not, better than the one at chabad

we proceeded to have a damn good seder. The passover story might have gotten a little colloquial, and some prayers may have been said in English rather than Hebrew, but in the end we proved that we are well on our way to becoming some quality jewish grandparents someday.