A day in the life of a hospitality student: market adventures .

Being a hospitality and tourism student has its pros and cons, just like life. The pros and cons differ for everyone. For me, the pros include the fun I have with my friends during field trips and cooking practicals, and also the ease of studying compared to other departments in my university. The cons include the stress I go through during cooking practicals (choosing the menu, costing and budgeting, going to the market to buy ingredients, typing and printing of several proposals, and the cooking itself) and field trips (especially field trips that last for days), and also the expenses spent (studying this course is too expensive).

I'm having a cooking practical tomorrow, so in this post I'm going to be sharing with you how I went to the market with my group leader today to get the ingredients for the practical. For the practical, we are preparing an indigenous three-course meal for four covers (for customers) and for my group, our meal includes bread rolls and assorted meat and pepper soup for appetizer, Ofada rice and ayamase sauce garnished with assorted meat, fish and eggs for the main course, and fruit cake with fruit salad for the dessert. All this is coupled with an alcoholic beverage and a non-alcoholic wine and two glasses each of tiger nut drink, smoothie, zobo drink, Chapman, soya drink and groundnut milk drink.

We left our hostels very early in the morning around 7:30 a.m because food vendors usually go to the market very early to buy what they need, so if we go in the afternoon we might not be able to get everything we need, and also we would have to walk around in the hot sun while carrying heavy bags. So we went to the meat market first to get our assorted meat, and while we were there, I learned that the butchering job is not an easy job and that It is very energy-consuming work.

From there, we went to the main market to get other ingredients. To be honest, it was not easy going around and around the market. The market is not an organized one where people selling the same products are together in one place, so we had to go all around buying things and crossing them off our list. We bought pepper, onions, rice, palm oil, groundnut oil, seasonings, eggs, fish, several other ingredients and cake ingredients too. At some point we had to buy a carbonated drink to boost our sugar and give us energy for a while.

Then we had to go to another market because we couldn't get fruits and some other things in this particular market. Getting there, we were able to buy all the fruits we needed at one stall. I can't express how happy we were about that, because at that point, we were already too tired.

After getting our fruits, we went to a shopping to get our milk products. I wasn't able to take pictures of all the things we bought because I was tired.

After this, we were done with our shopping, and we went back to our hostels to prepare for the practical itself, which is tomorrow. And this was around 2 p.m. I was able to learn quite a bit about the sellers in the market, how to price things, and also had some fun watching people in the market go about their businesses. So as much as it was stressful, it was also educative and fun in its own way.
I will be back tomorrow to share the process of cooking and presentation of the foods with you guys tomorrow, so until then🤗.
PS: All pictures were taken with my phone, which is Samsung S8.

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