JAMIE IN LONDONWanting to go to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and being accepted to the school are two very different things. After scouring the LCB website for hours upon hours, all the time developing my application strategy, I decided that an actual visit to the school was in order. My husband, Jamie, and I spent a week in London in August of 2008. While we were there we decided that it would be a perfect opportunity to visit LCB, albeit over a year in advance.
…on a side note, the ride from St Pancras Station (London) to Gare du Nord (Paris) is quick and extremely easy, but the ride through the Chunnel is hardly something to write home about (as I write about it here!). Of the 2 hour and 15 minute ride only about 45 minutes are spent in the Chunnel…I was expecting a much longer, darker ride…
We arrived into Gare du Nord with more than enough time to get to LCB, so we decided to walk from the station, map-less. Now, I have been to Paris before so I figured that we would just walk in the right direction and ultimately arrive where we needed to be. For those of you who have also been to Paris understand that this is an impossible feat. The streets in Paris are anything but straight. When you think you’re walking south, you’re actually walking east, and so forth. We finally gave up and made our way over to the Seine River. One can usually navigate their way around the city with ease along the Seine, as did we…for a short time. Once past the Eiffel Tower we began to make our way south towards the school. We, of course, again, got lost. By this point our more than enough time was running out. I was stressed as I envisioned my dream being washed away by my incompetence of lack of directions. Jamie suggested that we jump in a cab. I was crushed that my first interaction with LCB rushed over me like a bulldozer and that I had lost the challenge. So a cab we hailed. I was so disappointed in myself that I completely forgot that we were in a foreign country that didn’t speak English as revealed to me when the cabby started in on his French. Luckily, Jamie’s high school French saved us and he was able to communicate where we needed to go. Now, I’m not sure if we were really that lost or if the cabby was just driving around to jack up his fee, but we were no where near the school…and if we had stayed on foot we would have never found it.
For the entire train ride from London to Paris I envisioned how grand the greatest culinary school in the world must look. I thought of the baroqueness of the building. How the generations after generations of supremeness must just pour out of the ancient windows. Then the cab driver turned onto Rue Léon Delhomme. There was nothing but apartment buildings on this street. The street itself looked like a typical one way, suburban street. All of a sudden we stopped, paid the cabby, and got out of the taxi. Dropped off in front of the most ordinary, typical, unimaginative building that I had ever seen. This? This was the famed Le Cordon Bleu? This was my dream? This is what I so yearned for?
To the average eye the entire building, inside and out, looks ordinary. To me the building was secretive, keeping all of its techniques hidden, only for its students to see. This typical building didn’t cloud my desire, or my conviction that this was the place for me. I walked away with a clear understanding that this school is famed because of the top chefs in the world that it has produced, not by what its building looks like. My curiosity of what LCB really has to offer was peaked even more. To this day, I dream about the mysterious and rigorous training that I am about to embark on in one of the world’s most ordinary buildings.
As they say, you can't judge a book by it's cover!
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