Maine-ly Speaking…
Last-minute trips are sometimes the best. We hopped in a rental last week, drove the 7 hours down to Maine, and had big fun exploring Portland.
Archive for June, 2005
Co-opting MTV
We’ve made some fun photo music videos from travels so far. Take a gander.
Graduation and Assorted Mischief
At Cordon Bleu, if you fail the final exam (which is cooking, not written), you fail the entire term and have to repeat (and pay again for) all of it, no matter how you score on everything else throughout the term. For every minute that you’re late presenting your dish in the final, you lose two percentage points — and you can only lose a maximum of 12 percentage points for lateness before you fail. Other failure possibilities include burning part of the dish, ruining a sauce (or not being able to fix a broken one), bad sanitation measures, the dreaded “Chef, I dropped my prepared dish on the floor,” or a combination of a pretty lengthy list of possibilities.
We had our headache-inducing final this past Wednesday, and did not learn which dish we’d each be assigned to cook until 10 minutes before the exam (we can’t bring any of our class notes along). Now here’s the clincher: Know how we find out whether we actually passed? Here’s how: If the school calls to inform us we failed prior to graduation (which is scheduled for the following Saturday). Meaning, we’re basically all sitting around for 3 days hoping we’re not being bounced from the program, and cringing every time one of our cell phones rings. (They only call to let students know that they failed; they don’t call to let us know that we passed.) Or, as Chef Philippe explained a little too cheerfully, “A silent phone means that we will see you in Intermediate. Pray for the silent phone!” We know people do fail, so we’re not exactly fans of this approach, in case you couldn’t tell.
Other than that, we’ve been bopping around town and exploring, in a half-baked attempt to focus on things outside exams.
Oh yeah — we both passed.