Like Water for Chocolate

Bill writes: OK, we owe you all a post about Belgium, which we will get around to putting up in the next day or so. But this is one thing I just don't get in the meantime, and I'm hoping someone from Belgium will write and fill me in. Chocolate is cheap there. And I'm not talking regular candy bars, I'm talking about Belgian chocolate, gift boxed, the works. You can get a custom box filled with two dozen different, mouth-watering, mind-numbingly good truffles for about $6. I mean, how can they do this? Is it Belgium's way of eradicating (or rather shifting) the drug problem? (Heroin's expensive, but we can get you pure dark chocolate on any street corner?)

On the other hand, you can't get free water. We asked for tap water at more than one restaurant and were uniformly, albeit politely, refused each time. OK, then, we'd like to buy a bottle of water. Unfortunately, a single bottle of water wouldn't fill my nephew's juice cup. They come in these special little 300 milliliter containers that we haven't seen anywhere else. So you would need about half a dozen of them to get through a meal. Instead we ordered the large bottle, enough for two glasses apiece, which costs $10. So water goes for about $2.50 a glass in quantity or about $5 a glass if you order individually.

I assume it's set up this way to compensate for the trade imbalance caused by the chocolatiers. You've got all these people with all this chocolate stuffed in their mouths and nothing to wash it down with. Maybe the Belgian restauranteurs are using the cheap chocolate fix to get the bottled water monkey on our backs?