Lubna Alli

I can already sense the agonizing question coming my way Monday morning. “What’d you do this weekend?” I have no cool response. No, I didn’t end up tasting macaroons in Paris, and I wish I could tell you I was salsa-ing in Barcelona or swimming in the south of Italy’s blue waters. Instead, I spent my weekend at Sperandie. Boringggggggg. I’m speaking your thoughts for you. Sometimes it’s easier to poke fun at yourself first before others have the opportunity to poke fun at you.

It’s not like I didn’t want to do anything outside of the walls of Siena, it’s more like my I fell victim to poor planning. We fell victim to the plight of the Spontaneous Motivator. What we needed instead was the Driver. The Spontaneous Motivator consisted of the majority of our group, who find themselves in trouble because they are too passionate and therefore have a hard time making decisions.

The Driver, in contrast, is the decision maker. They look to get things done, opting for the most practical and realistic way, even if it is not the most fun. Method and consistency are two of their favourite words. As is probably evident at this point, the driver was not a dominant member of our group.

The amount of options in terms of what I could do with my weekend that were thrown my way was overwhelming. I knew I wanted to go somewhere, Barcelona being at the top of the list. I just didn’t know how to go about planning it. And I sure as heck was not gonna travel wherever on my own. (I’m paranoid like that). Turned out that everyone else wanted to join in. Okay, no problem, the more the merrier. This is where the problem lies. The more people that became involved, the harder it became to plan. Everyone had a different opinion on where we should go and on what we should do. By the end of it all, there was a group of 12 of us looking for a weekend getaway, and by the looks of it, the thought of us splitting from the group and doing our own things didn’t cross our minds.

We started concrete planning for the weekend during the week, on something like Monday or Tuesday, still last minute for a planner like me, but also still hopeful for an adventurer like me. Oh, the irony. Planning and adventuring don’t usually seem to go hand in hand.

Eventually Wednesday night creeps up and stress hits us because we realize that we have to juggle assignments that are due the following day, and the most stressful of all, booking a flight and hotel within our budget. We also had more little things to worry about, like figuring out the different trains we had to take and how we were gonna get to the train station from our residence (typically a 40 minute walk, that could easily turn into a 1 hour walk with a big group like ours).

Classes here run Monday to Thursday from 9am to 12pm, leaving us with a three and half day weekend. With most students opting to hop on a plane and fly to a nearby city right after class on Thursday afternoon, we were definitely not prepared enough to fly to another city.

Push comes to shove and we end up deciding it’s better to stay in for the weekend, spending Thursday night at a local spot known as Società La Pania. We lay low for the rest of the weekend, catching up on sleep and our neglected readings, not forgetting to treat ourselves to a pool day at a Hotel II Giordano on Saturday. Chinese food wasn’t a bad choice either. Who needs macaroons from Paris anyways?

Having a Driver in our group would’ve probably benefitted our weekend with cooler stories, but our Spontaneous Motivators side brought to us new findings. Chinese food in Italy and much needed sleep seems like a good trade off to me.

Next weekend we’ll go salsa-ing in Barcelona! Or maybe we should do Paris? A macaroon does sound pretty good right about now.

 

Staying Hungry,

Lubna