Last Day of Cooking Class

This is a picture of me and my friends from my cooking class. From the left it is Ben, me, Zack (who is from West Virginia, right by Ashville) and is here studying for a few years, and Martin, who is from Sweden and just came here and doesn't know how long he will stay. Yesterday was the last day of cooking class. Our last class consisted of two soups and our translator had to leave half way through, so I had to translate after that. But it actually went OK. Then Simon gave us our certificates, so we are now all official Sichuan cooks.
After that, we were going to check out the kitchen and have a banquet at a nearby restaurant. It was a very fancy restaurant and there was going to be a wedding banquet later that night as well. We put on our coats and spent about and hour and a half or so wondering around the kitchen trying not to get in the way and observing. There is a group of 5 chefs here from Culinary Institute of America that were also there observing. They are only here for a week though and most of them don't speak Chinese, so they kind of stuck to the side. The kitchen was amazing. It was very organized and chaotic at the same time. There was a xipai area where you wash and clean everything. Then there was a cutting area where everything is cut into the proper size pieces and put into bowls. Then the bowls are stacked/piled according to dish so you have everything for one dish all together. Then when the dish is ordered the bowls move over to the wok station where the dish is cooked and plated. Then the sous chef tries it before it goes out. There are also special rooms for cold dishes, xiao chi (snacks, like jiaozi and baozi and little noodle dishes), and a steaming area. I was talking with some of the chefs and it was amazing to see them work. Everything looked really yummy. There were some weird things too though, like in the cleaning area there was a guy ripping the skins off frogs in one pull. Impressive, but also disgusting. After that we went up into a little private banquet room and had our "banquet lesson". The other Americans from the culinary school were there too. Before we ate Lu Dashi, our main teacher, told us about the tradition of Chinese banquet and the different parts and how to pair dishes. There are 5 parts of Chinese banquet; cold dishes, hot dishes, snacks, soup, and fruit. Each course has between 8 and 13 dishes that should range in flavor (sweet, salty, hot, etc) and preparation method. Except the fruit course at the end which is like dessert, of course. Traditionally each course is brought out separately, but often times traditional banquet etiquette is not followed and you just eat all the kinds of dishes together. It was very good, but Ben and I both decided that we like Sichuan home-style cooking better. Ben is going to get an internship at this restaurant for a month starting next Thursday, which will be very cool. Difficult though because he doesn't really speak Chinese. It's also not like the US where even if you don't speak English at all chefs will jump at the chance to have free labor. In China labor is cheap and abundant, so it's almost more of a burden, but I hope it goes well for him. Well, I'm off to the new IKEA that just opened in Chengdu a few weeks ago. I need to buy a dish rack.