Every day I wake up around 9 as my flatmate clomps around his morning routine. It's a converted artist's loft, and you can play hide-and-go-seek with anything that might be reputed to be "insulation" or "soundproofing". Though he is nice and generally considerate, there's just no way I can't hear him. I loll around in my futon bed a little, checking out the weather of the morning through the skylight.

Soon after he leaves for work I get up, do the morning thing, and go online for a short while — check a little email, taste a little blogdom, post some recent photos. Most days I have something in mind, so I head toward centre-ville ("downtown", except Paris is very truly concentric) for some window shopping or errand running.

At 3 or so in the afternoon, I get to school and change, sometimes with enough time to hang out a bit before demo begins. The 2.5-hour demo for our 20-person usually consists of one plate (so far) that we'll have to prepare during practical, with sometimes another just so we can see more classical cooking methods.

With a short break we split up into two groups for practical, overseen by either the teaching chef from the demo or a sous-chef (in French, they're called secondes) from the Paris two-star restaurant Le Bristol. The first week our group had only a rotation of sous-chefs in practical, and we had some qualms when the sous-chef saw us monkeying something the teaching chef had done in demo (e.g. glazing green beans — apparently that's never done at Bristol). In retrospect, I think I generally prefer the sous-chefs. They're (again, generally!) slightly more patient at teaching, and they see practical as less of a rote repetition of what we done three hours before than as a time to reproduce the dish as quickly as possible. Also my classmates seem to like the eye candy; it's like Fleet Week all the time in the chef's whites except this fleet MAKES FOOD NOT WAR.

The first two days of class were almost lethal; they had us doing five types of tiny little precision cuts such as brunoise, a 2mm dice, the first day and gutting/filleting three whole fish the second. Certainly taking kitchen shears to the fins and lovingly poking the eyes out of them little buggers (eyes give a bitter traste to the stock) makes me a much less hypocritical omnivore, I hope. As time's gone on we've gotten better at working with each other and organizing stuff in the cramped rooms; thus a little less stressful.

In school, as in industry kitchens, all the pots and pans are all metal and they all go into the oven. One of the most popular ways of heat inducing is to brown stuff in a frying pan on the oven, brown some vegetables in the same juices, then replace the meat and stick the pan into the oven to bake at 180 Celsius. Obviously the pan handles come out at 180 as well, but never in our 17 or 22 or 39 years of life have those happy little long pot handles been HOT. The chefs must have said it a dozen times during demo and another score in practical as they walk around poking and advising, but everyone, but everyone, is in turn learning the lesson each their own hard hard way. I hit just about average in both chronology (Day 7, boeuf bourgignon) and severity.