Weekend Recap and Homework Woes

I survived my first weekend on the CIA campus!

Saturday was my day of fun - I went to the closest mall (which is still 45 minutes away) with my friends Katie, Shandell, Clarissa, and Natalie so that we could buy dresses for the winter formal that night. Then we had a getting-ready party in our room and headed off to the dance, which was held in the main campus building. The formal was AMAZING. The Greystone building, which already looks significantly like a castle, looked even more gothic and beautiful with all of the Christmas decorations up. They had candelabras on all the tables, dozens of fir trees and strands of twinkling lights, tables of amazing food (duh), and best of all a photobooth, which is where my friends and I spent most of the night. When I get a chance I'll post some of the ridiculous pictures we took.
We spent the rest of the night dancing with the other students there. The CIA is funny like that... there are only 250 students enrolled in the school and we all have classes at the same time, so you get to know everyone really fast. All of the baking and pastry students started off dancing in one small group but pretty soon everyone was dancing with everyone else. It's a really inclusive school. I've only been here for 9 days but I feel like I already recognize most of the faces.
After the dance my roommate and I and a bunch of our friends went to hang out in this kid Steven's room where we spoke in Spanish and listened to people play the guitar until like 3 in the morning. It reminded me a lot of a night I would have spent at Vassar, which was pleasant and nostalgic all at once.

Sunday was horrible. It turns out they actually assign a lot of homework in culinary school. Like, a lot. My roommate and I worked on homework from 10:30 in the morning until 8:00 at night, with only a short break for lunch, and only managed to finish our work for one class. Out of five.

And it's no different today either. Mondays are light class days - we only have one lecture to sit through from 7:00 AM until 9:00 AM, meaning I'm back in my dorm and finished with my day before some people wake up in the morning. This was great today because it gave me a chance to work on the endless piles of coursework I have for my other four classes this week (which I still haven't quite finished), but I'm kind of worried that if the workload keeps up like this I won't be able to finish it on the days when I don't get out of class until 2:00. I'm not sure what to do about this... I'm hoping everything will settle down once I get into the routine of things and I'll start to get a handle on how to manage my time better. And, on the plus side, this definitely beats the homework I was doing last year at this time. At least now I'm reading about food chemistry and recipe formation and things I'm actually interested in.