a chocolate house and childhood besties

One of the highlights from my trip home last week was catching up with my best friends from childhood (we've known each other since Primary school and junior high, so it's been a good 10+ years now!), and we made a trip to a local chocolate shop/factory in Jogja. It's called Monggo, and they make the finest chocolate from Indonesian cocoa beans. They taste SO good, and I ended up buying so many! The dark chocolate are to die for, I tell you.

The place was really nice, and hardly looked like a chocolate factory at all. It was more like a cozy little house, and it was decorated with bits of our Javanese culture - and nothing's more Javanese than our Batik and Wayang puppets. The word for chocolate in Indonesian, "cokelat", also means the colour brown, which I also notice is the dominant colour tone of the place. Nice and earthy. There's something nice about getting in touch with my own culture, and seeing familiar sights that I hardly see when I'm living abroad... and to appreciate that with the friends I grew up with years ago, was just lovely.

You will notice that this is one of the very rare posts where I am actually showing my face. I'm the one in the brown polka dot skirt, by the way.