Sophistication and... Bowling
As promised, today is New England Events Day! Or, for this first one - a chocolate tasting event - perhaps "snobby cities events day" would be more acccurate. Perhaps this chocolate tasting afternoon more than ever outlined the difference between MIT and Harvard to me. I suspect that such an event at Harvard would consist of several nattily-attired snobby persons standing around with magnifying glasses, examining the chocolate and making sophisticated small-talk regarding the unique bouquet of aromas resonating from the cocoas. However, we are at MIT and, as such, rely simply on the evaluating the evidence in front of us, making a hypothesis, and testing it. We were actually given a booklet describing what the different chocolates were (probably about 100 chocolates in all on display), so I will summarize for you the most important facts I read/observed and the experiments I subsequently undertook:
FACT: Chocolate contains over 600 volatile flavour molecules reminscent of mushrooms, fruit, wine, nuts, flowers and spices
FACT: As fine chocolate melts in your mouth, it actually cools your mouth as fat crystals melt and absorb heat from the body.
FACT: Pure chocolate bars should have a radiant sheen
FACT: Between sampling different chocolates, you should cleanse your palate with sparkling water and/or a neutral food such as crackers
HYPOTHESIS: Who on earth cares, there are several pounds of free chocolate to eat on the table!
EXPERIMENT: Eat copious quantities of chocolate (in a systematic way of course)
RESULTS: Pure cacoa is almost inedible... love the milk chocolates.
CONCLUSIONS: Chocolate is good.
Second interesting activity was a true New England special - candlepinning! Candlepinning is essentially a cross between ten and five-pin bowling. The pins are narrow cylinders and are arranged in the same geometry as 10-pin bowling pins... the ball is roughly the same size although a little lighter than a 5-pin bowling ball. The differences between candlepinning and bowling which I noticed are two-fold (1) it is almost impossible to get a strike - the pins are so narrow, you don't get the same pin-on-pin action when you throw a good one (I only got one strike in 20 frames,
much less than my typical 5-pin performance) (2) any fallen pins are not cleaned up from the lanes between throws in the same frame. This leads to some truly fascinating shots such as the one which one of my friends used to defeat me in our first game. I was up by two points and he was down to his last shot, which ended up being a gutter ball which hit the gutter about 2/3 the way down the lane. However, one of the fallen candlepins was overhanging the gutter and was contacted by the gutter ball, launching the stray pin up into four of the still-standing pins to vanquish me in a pool of tears (really, it was very emotional for me... I don't like losing) :) In another frame, he again hit a gutter candlepin, sending it into the adjacent lane and knocking down three pins for the person bowling beside us (who was, of course, thrilled). Kind of a neat game though. This is actually just one of many things (most of them less unique than this) which I have been doing to keep myself sane on weekends with a really fantastic group of friends here from my church who, like me, enjoy doing "lame" activities such as board games, classic movie nights, and pastry road trips (some awfully good stuff around here, let me assure you!) - it's been great to have them around!
Tomorrow: The FINAL INSTALLMENT OF MEGA-BLOG... the long-awaited Blogging Truancy Excuse #3 (it's a good one, you'll want to come back for it!)
