Quel heure est-il où tu es?

Un autre avions et tu repars 
(Simple Plan - Jet Lag ft. Marie-Mai)

I had no class scheduled for today. Cordon Bleu's schedule is known to be quite erratic. Classes can take place during any of the following periods 8:30am-11:30am, 12:30pm-3:30pm, 3:30pm-6:30pm, 6:30pm-9:30pm from Monday to Saturday. Because there are 9 basic groups sharing 3 kitchens with intermediate, advanced and recreational classes, our schedules completely depend on the availability of kitchens and instructors. Cordon Bleu classes are designed so that students can take the basic cuisine and basic pastry classes concurrently, which is advertised as a 40 hours/week commitment. Therefore, for folks like me taking only the regular speed basic class, the advertised class time is 20 hours/week, which sounds incredibly little. The truth is somewhat complicated. First is you would always need to bake in extra time to dress into your cook's uniform because you are not allowed to wear the uniforms outside of school premises for hygene reasons. (You don't want to cook with clothes that have germs and dust all over them). More importantly, because classes can take place any time during the day, there are often awkward times of the day when students have nothing to do. Take one of my weeks as an example:

There are days when I have 3 hour gaps between classes. Days when I have no classes, and quite a few Saturday 6:30pm classes. For students who live far away from school, it just doesn't make sense for them to go home if they have a few hours between classes. Cordon Bleu also provides very few public access rooms for students to hang around, ie just a depressing "Winter Garden" that looks like it was hacked together in the 60s.

All in all, I wish that Cordon Bleu would group all students into clusters of Monday, Tuesday Wednesday and Wednesday Thursday Friday or something like that. This would allow students to work really hard for a few days straight, and then have more efficiently timed free time.

So what did I do on my free day today? I babysitted my niece all day! She's absolutely adorable but I think I've changed enough shit diapers for a lifetime. Well I guess this is growing up.