Chocolate and dancing make for a pretty good week...

Even though vacation technically ended on Monday when we returned to class, this past week felt like an extension of vacation. We spent Monday observing chef make a chocolate egg sculpture so we would be able to reproduce the same thing the next day. In other words, we stood around most of day observing chef between our conversations about vacation and life in France while he kept asking us if we were paying attention. Luckily, we paid enough attention to make eggs of our own on Tuesday which meant crystallizing 5 kilos/10 lbs of chocolate (the most fun you've ever had in your life!), going through a ridiculous amount of paper towel and trying to keep the chocolate on the table and not ourselves - no such luck for me, I left with chocolate in some most unfortunate places that my classmates were all to quick to point out. I wasn't incredibly satisfied with my egg, partly because the creativity that I needed to make it pop didn't get the memo that vacation was over. 

On Wednesday and Thursday we worked on our chocolate sculptures - we were allowed to make a sculpture of anything we wanted and after being shutdown several times by chef (Bicycle..."No, too hard", hot air balloon...."No, too hard"...you get the picture), I decided to make a dancer. After buying some requisite material (plastic piping) I set to work on Thursday and by the afternoon, I was beyond frustrated. I was supposed to use the plastic piping to make the dancers body and appendages but neither I nor chef had counted on how hard it was going to be to cut the chocolate out of the piping. After about an hour of chocolate "surgery" - that's exactly what it felt like - I managed to salvage the requisite appendages and almost did a dance of thanksgiving because I didn't have to start all over again. At the end of the day, I had managed to make the pieces I needed to assemble the dancer and the base so tomorrow is assembly time - we shall see if I can make this dancer come alive. 

On Friday we met before dawn (4am!) and went to Rungis, the biggest fresh food market in the world. Rungis supplies restaurants and retailers in Paris with seafood, fish, meat, dairy, fruits/vegetables, flowers, etc. Basically, if you eat food in Paris, chances are it came from Rungis. The market, which sits on 450+ acres is a city in itself with 1400 sellers, 12,500 workers, car dealerships, a police station and anywhere from 20,000-60,000 buyers depending on the season. More than 1.5 million tons of product are sold at Rungis each year - craziness!

We visited the fish market, triperie (cow "leftovers" such as tongue, liver...you get the picture), butcher, dairy market, fruit/vegetable market and flower market. My favorite was the triperie and the butcher...Just kidding!! Talk about a vegetarians nightmare - I won't even go into detail about what we saw; the triperie and the butcher are the only sections I didn't take pictures of, for a very good reason. It was really interesting to see all the different types of products that come through the market; the quality and prices are unbelievable. We were able to buy a few things at Rungis and the prices we paid for produce and pastry ingredients was at least half the price consumers pay at specialties stores and markets in Paris...lucky us! 

Tuna

The biggest & ugliest catfish I've ever seen 

In other non-school related news...I signed up for dance classes this week and boy does it feel good to dance again. Since I registered for classes this fall, I can take as many classes as I want until July; I've been gorging myself on dance classes. I took a samba class on Tuesday, a belly dance class on Wednesday and a ragga/dance hall class this weekend all of which were AMAZING. I also went to see several hip-hop groups perform short pieces tonight at La Villette - I just can't get enough of dance! 

We have a fully charged week - cuisine tomorrow,service on Wednesday (this service could get pretty interesting) and no class on Friday. Time to rest up...

I just realized that almost every paragraph I just wrote ends with an exclamation point...guess my week was more exciting than I thought it was...