Let’s see how the French think of other nations. For the Swiss, a watch. For the Spanish, a guitar. And for the Belgians…

So America has been wrong all along. They are not really French fries, they are Belgian fries. The French are disowning them. I wonder what they call the French horn?

We’ve driven past the local chocolate museum several times now, and finally got around to visiting it. We were the only english speaking visitors for the 10:30 tour so we got a guide to ourselves. She explained the whole intricate process of going from this…

… to a finished chocolate bar. Those are cocoa flowers. They are really tiny and grow directly on the trunk of the tree. A very few of them turn into seed pods.

These ripen…

… are harvested, and then the fun begins. They are stacked in wooden boxes to ferment for six days.

The delicious sweet lychee flavored pith that surrounds the beans rots away, and the bitter beans take on a distinctive chocolate flavor. The beans are then separated from the rest of the goo, air dried, roasted at low temperature, broken up, husks separated from nibs, and the nibs are then ground into cacao paste. The paste is heated and compressed to separate out the cacao butter. Take what’s left, add sugar, some of the cacao butter you just took out, and perhaps some dairy fat, and you have chocolate.

Which as we all know, is really all about sex.

The lascivious cacao gets pleasure by endorphine secretions…

Is that a transferred epithet or are you just pleased to see me?

Here are some more pictures from the cacao garden.

Oh, look, it’s Bill and Ben, The Flowerpot Men

Only in French they’re probably Guillaume et Benjamin, as the French throw in a lot of letters they have no intention of pronouncing. I rather enjoy the signs that have Creole and well as French on them, as Creole is spelled the way it is pronounced. Deshaises, where we are staying, becomes Déhé, and l’état français becomes léta fwansé.

After the chocolate, and lunch, we went snorkeling at another local beach. We saw a lion fish.

It’s a dangerous and ecologically damaging invasive species, but very pretty. The corals here are nice and the small fish are lovely…

… but anything larger than a parrotfish has been fished out. No sharks, no rays, no grouper, no big barracuda.

Our AirBnB is only a few yards from the set of Death In Paradise…

… which I was happy to discover is marked on Google Maps as a real police station!

So anyhow, here’s the selfie. Soon we’ll go and take a look inside.