A while back, we had a class meeting to discuss some of the points around our Pro Baking and Pastry Art’s Field School trip to Paris. Attending this meeting were both Ralph Nilson, President of the University, and Fred MacDonald, Dean of Trades & Applied Technology, both mentioning how great an opportunity this will be and how proud they are that we’ll be VIU representatives while over there.

Dean MacDonald, Andrea (modelling our new red hoodie) Mr Barnett and President Nilson

The whole group (almost) also sporting the hoodies kindly funded by our bakery suppliers Sysco and Snowcap. In the blue hoodies are the team leaders, Angelique at far left, Chef Harper and Chef Gower (center right) and Mr Barnett. We’ll be sure to stand out when we hit Paris and Europain!

We are nearly all meeting at the Duke Point Ferry on Thursday at 12:00 noon to get over to Vancouver Airport, then it’s off to Paris at 8:30 p.m.. We will be landing at Paris’ Charles De Gaulle  Airport at about 5:30 PM Friday, a total flying time of just 10 hours, 25 minutes. True, it doesn’t quite compute correctly until you account for the short layover at London’s Heathrow for an hour plus the clocks going forward 8 hours. We’ll be meeting up with a few people who chose to fly solo for various reasons and head off to our rooms at the St Christopher’s Paris Hostel in the 19th arrondissement. I’ll try to post a mini-review of this accommodation a little later on in the trip. But from what I have read, it’s a pretty decent place, rather new, clean and modern.

Then on Saturday, the fun starts with an orientation meeting in the morning and then we head into the amazing Europain exhibition and mingle with some of the world’s top bakers and pastry artists.

But I’m jumping ahead of myself a bit here; I’m writing this two days before we actually take off, so I’ll end here for now and fill in the details of the trip from VIU (or at least the ferry) onwards once we actually do it.

Keep an eye out for the next post!

Your humble blogger,
Paul

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2012 at 10:27 pm and is filed under Pre-trip entries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.