Europe | Les Roches Students Blog | Les Roches International School of Hotel Management

In Cologne

It has been far too long since my last blog post and so much has happened since then.

We all went off on mid-term break in the first week of April. One of the beauties of being in Switzerland is that travel is very easy and getting around Europe is not difficult at all. I made a weekend stop in Cologne, Germany to visit a friend and then took a train to Paris to spend the rest of the holiday. Both cities were absolutely beautiful. The weather was not great but a little break was good and it is always fun to spend time with friends. I even met up with a Jamaican friend in Paris by surprise!

From the Eifel Tour

We came back to school and went straight into the kitchen at the formal dining restaurant Le Tacot. For two weeks we worked as a small restaurant would. Each person worked in a station and completed a part of the dish all coming together for plate presentation. The first week was lunch service and we created a set menu each day. The second was dinner service where guests choose from an a la carte menu. I helped with cold kitchen, but was in charge of the dessert station, and I can now make very good crème brulée and chocolate mousse. Our proudest moment was receiving 100% for our dinner exam!!

Plates of cold appetiser for a Banquet one evening

After that we had the hottest night of the year: Auction Night. The graduating class makes different efforts to raise money for their graduation celebrations. Auction night involves bidding on each other to share a dinner date. I was “bought” for 175 CHF. The evening is always fun and we had a blast this year dressing up and having a laugh with everyone involved.

The girls at Auction Night

This past weekend a few of us braved the Lausanne 20KM run. Only 5 were brave enough to go for the full 20KM and the rest completed the 10KM. It was a very challenging run for us all but it was a good day and we made it back to Bluche safely.

After all of this and in between all of this we are working towards our final projects, assessments and exams. It would be safe to say that Bluche is very busy at the moment.

In the middle of the semester we have our midterm break, 1 week off which most of us have used to relax, do some traveling or go back home to visit family and friends.

Many of my classmates and friends have taken advantage of this time to discover and explore some new areas in Europe.

Garda Lake

As I have mentioned before in older posts, living in Switzerland gives you easy access to most of the cities in Central Europe that can easily be reached by train. There are a variety of convenient flights available to reach other cities further away in a matter of just a couple of hours.

I went to northern Italy with my family, there we visited Venice and Milan and stayed most of the time by the Garda Lake which was beautiful.

Milano

For the prospective students who read this post and want to get more information about traveling within and outside Switzerland it’s good to check the national train system website: www.sbb.ch which I highly recommend to become a member of.

Besides the regular academic schedules and the practical activities that the students need to perform, there are Special weeks in which the students have different schedules and have a chance to attend workshops and execute other tasks. My class had a chance to experience serving in a banqueting style setting and also attending a workshop on the same day.

Here I have got a video of us during a very interesting and fun workshop of Molecular food that is a new concept that many of us had never experienced before. In this video, our professor Chef in the “A la Carte Restaurant”, is giving a demonstration of Molecular desserts using compressed nitrogen to freeze or lower the temperature of these ingredients. As for the best part of molecular cuisine, check out how all of us are eager to taste this!