I achieved half of these things.
I didn't really know much about the Ritter Sport Museum, except that the store is amazing, and it's with in the Stuttgart public transportation net, meaning with my student ID I could get there for free. Hooray!
I had to take the S-bahn to a nice little suburb called Leinfelden or something like that, and then a half hour bus ride to the little town that Ritter Sport is situated in. It was really quite a lovely ride. The bus drove through a mixture of charming narrow old town streets, and countryside middle-of-nowhere-looking roads.
My destination town turned out to be a very cutesy looking place, and had it not been a holiday, I would have much liked to wander around a bit.
I was quite surprised once I made it to the Ritter Sport visitors center (which was a convenient 5 minute walk from the bus stop). The "museum" is broken up into a small exhibit on chocolate/ the history of Ritter Sport, and an art gallery for local people to showcase their work. The former was free, the latter cost 4Euro and so I opted out.
(It was lots of ulta modern art anyway, the kind where an artist would tell me "you just don't understand" as onlookers gaze at the $1200 masterpiece of a button glued to a piece of cardboard.... I may be exaggerating, but you get the idea)
The chocolate exhibit, however, was pretty neat. There was a large section dedicated to explaining where EACH of the kinds of the ingredients Ritter Sport uses in its chocolates comes from - including 3 kinds of cocoa beans ( that's how you spell it in English, right? German = kakkao) AND they even had little packaged beans for people to take home as a souvenier (-ir, -eer ? that's a hard one too!)
The rest of the exhibit consisted of telling about the founding of Ritter Sport (there was even a movie theater room for that) and showing how Ritter Sport has changed over the years since the company in the 30s (I think it was the 30s. I was more interested at the time in eating chocolate than learning brand history).
OH! and there was this super neat diorama thing! Parents: It was like the Big Big Loader toy, but 3 times the size, and instead of picking up mini coal pieces, it delivered a mini Ritter Sport bar to you!
For everyone who has no idea what the Big Big Loader toy was;
The Ritter Sport diorama thing consisted of a factory warehouse garage, an office building/ store, a road going between them, and a road from the building to a little trap door thing - like they have in crane machines games where your piece of chocolate would be dispensed to you, because the entire thing was enclosed in glass.
So there was a little toy truck with an open trailer part that would drive into the garage where a little ritter sport bar would drop into the back. Then the truck would drive to the store building thing, and some lights would flash, I supposed to add excitement, and then the truck would drive to the trap door, and tilt the trailer part to one side and viola! You get chocolate!
It would be so much easier to explain this if I had taken a picture.
Of course I was highly amused and wanted a free chocolate square! The only problem was that the place was swarming with children roughly 7 and under. BUT I wasn't going to let that stop me. I waited patiently for about 10 minutes in what was an attempt at a line, before impatient children began crowding around every side of the diorama. It was very frustrating, but eventually I made it to the front and got my free chocolate.
And then I proceeded to go the store below the exhibit and buy chocolate. A good deal of it in fact. Candy bars that sell for 0,85 Euro at the grocery store cost only 0,69 Euro at the Ritter Sport store, AND they have an entire room for their Test flavor bars, which only cost 0,49 Euro! I was successful in acquiring chocolate to last me for the next 6 weeks.
Loot!
EVERYTHING IS WONDERFUL!
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