As I woke up this morning and prepared myself for the day, I quickly glanced over our schedule to see what exciting adventures awaited. When I read that we were going to a chocolate demo, visiting a brewery and a having a tour of Audi, I instantly got excited. I knew we were going to have such an exciting day and I sure wasn’t disappointed.

The day started with a tour of the Cantillon Brewery which is located, oddly enough, within the city of Brussels. After a very short bus ride, we wound up at the brewery raring to go. Our group met up with our tour guide inside and started giving us a very detailed history of the brewery. He started with how it’s the only one thats located within the city and that most of the neighbors have no idea that its even there. He followed up with how they brew their beer via nature rules and only during winter in order to preserve the purity of their brew. It completely astonished me that they have been using the same equipment since their inception in the very early 20th century.

After the tour, the customary tasting was in order where I abstained however it seemed that the overall consensus of the group was that it was very bitter and completely unlike any other beer they’ve ever tasted. So you can take that however you wish.

Following our visit to the brewery, we took a quick bus guided tour of the parts of Brussels that we have yet to see and saw some wonderful sights, including one of the most well known structures in Belgium, The Atomium

It’s kinda crazy how big that structure really is. I really wasn’t expecting it to be all that massive but the picture above is taken about 300 meters away and it still looks huge, up close its even bigger. Our tour continued with scenes of the royal palace and others iconic structures that I only heard about because…I fell asleep halfway through.

Following our short bus tour around Brussels, led to our very exciting chocolate demonstration at Chocopolus located in the city square right off the Grand Plaza. I must apologize to you, kind readers, that I did not take any photos of the chocolate demonstration itself nor of the shop we were located in but I do have one picture…

The chocolatier that gave us the demonstration also gave us an abundance of info regarding the subject. For instance, chocolatiers in Belgium are required to attend chocolate school for five plus years before being hired on at any one of Belgium’s 500 chocolate shops. Additionally, the chocolate that the premium shops use come from the Congo in Africa. It is said that the chocolate there is of a purer quality and provides Belgian chocolatiers with the proper proportions of coco powder and coco butter.

Pro Tip: If you are looking for the best quality chocolate at your local store, check the ingredient list and make sure it contains coco butter. The butter extracted from the coco bean is extremely expensive and most organizations use cheaper oils to keep costs down. If the only oil the chocolate contains is coco butter, you know you have a high quality chocolate.

To wrap up our day, we headed off to the most highly anticipated stop of the day: Audi. Just outside of the city, there is an Audi manufacturing plant that exclusively assembles the A1 model. The tour started off rather hectic, as the administration lost our reservation, but before we knew it, we were touring the inter workings of this high end automobile manufacturer. We visited three separate buildings, the showroom, the raw goods assembly plant and finally the final production line. We met our hosts in the showroom where we were able to check out a few magnificent cars.

Our tour continued with the raw material production plant where we saw a cacophony of robots all working in a rhythmic ballet to assemble all of the parts of the frame for the A1. Our tour ended with the final assembly plant where we saw five separate production lines transform a simple and basic car frame to a working automobile that was able to drive out of the plant. This experience was incredibly eyeopening as there are no robots in the final assembly plant and everything is put together by hand. Unfortunately due to the security restraints we were under, no photos were allowed in any of the plants but the sight of these cars will never leave my mind.

I’m to the point of the day where I’m sure my devoted followers can automatically assume what we did next. That’s correct! We went out for dinner and a few drinks and called it a night. Luckily we dined in a local sports bar that was playing the Creighton/Cincinnati and I was able to see my Jays kick the living baJesus out of those punk ass kids from Ohio…great way to end the day.