Of pretzels, stop lights and bananas

Pretzels were, for a long time, a mystery to me. I read about it in books, but I had never seen any. I remember a passage in a Sweet Valley High book where Jessica comes home, goes "Yum! Pretzels!" and heads straight for an open bag of pretzels on the counter.

In another book (I've forgotten what book), there was a child who went to a sweetshop and bought a single pretzel. He (or she) had a particular way of eating pretzels; it was by first licking off all the salt, then eating the pretzel itself. It gave me the image of a pretzel being like a potato chip (or more like one of those corn snacks, puffed up...or those prawn crackers), probably because of the mention of "salt" :P

I wasn't much of an Internet user then, so I never went searching for it online. And it wasn't till a few years ago, after coming to France, that I finally found pretzels...and even then I didn't quite understand how it could be that thing I had read about!

On my trip to Switzerland and Colmar, I saw pretzels (they were called bretzels) being sold in a train station (I remember it was while walking out of the station) I can't quite remember whether it was in Basel (in Switzerland) or in Colmar (in France) - these towns are close to each other! I bought one just to try it. It looked something like this (prettier though :P )

It was simply like bread...I liked it because of the crust :)

I'm not sure whether at that time I had already bought pretzels in France. We can find them easily in the supermarket, in the snacks section. But they are nothing like bread; they are hard and dry!

The pretzels are in this form, and also the same form as the bread, but much smaller.
I like this kind less than the bread, though.

You might wonder why I suddenly thought of writing about pretzels...it's because I read this on Trivia Today:

In A.D. 610, while baking bread, an Italian monk decided
to create a treat to motivate his students. He rolled out
ropes of dough, twisted them to resemble hands crossed on
the chest in prayer, and baked them. The monk named his
snacks pretiola, Latin for “little reward.” When pretiola
arrived in Germany, they were called bretzels.

Hard pretzels were “invented” in the late 1600s, when a
snoozing apprentice in a Pennsylvania bakery accidentally
overbaked his pretzels, creating crunchy, seemingly
inedible, knots. Lucky for him that the master baker took
a bite of his creation and loved it!

(the pictures came from Wikipedia)

Besides, I recently came across a quote that made me laugh. Here it is:
"With a stop light, green means 'go' and yellow means 'slow down'. With a banana, however, it is quite the opposite. Yellow means 'go', green means 'whoa, slow down', and red means 'where the heck did you get that banana?'"
-Mitch Hedberg