Briannas' Blog

I really enjoyed our trip to San Francisco. I thought it was especially nice that at the end of the year we got to choose where we were wanted to go to. I really liked that we were able to plan our trip and that we handled our own money. I think we did a very good job handling money and that we gained experience from doing it. However, I did not like that sometimes when we had dinners together we had to pay more than we ate, like at a dim sum, it just made more sense for us to eat at a place where everyone orders for themselves when it is a whole group thing. I did enjoy eating dinner as a full group because it gave us time to enjoy listening to other groups experiences and finding out if we should maybe change our plans to go to somewhere rather than stick to our original plans. Over all I really liked the outline of our trip.

The group I was in was more of the wanderers and the walkers. I liked our loose schedule that allowed us to do some things in reverse or stop by a store to pick up some fresh fruit or something and then eat it all a a park. I also enjoyed our group because as a group our money was not spent foolishly and that we were able to just stop by a place if we all wanted a snack or something and just get whatever we wanted. I also liked the group itself. We were all more on the calmer side, so we got around easier. We also were never complaining and always flexible with doing some things that some may not want to, but others were eager to get done. I thought over all that the concept of different groups was good and made perfect sense based on our numbers as a whole, but I think that if we were to be there longer, we would need to switch the groups up a bit from time to time. I also think that the way we planned where we went was perfect. We scheduled our destinations more by geography than theme, and that worked out quite well because we got from place to place way easier than if we had to take a thirty minute bus to and from every place we went to.  

I liked the length of the trip as well. It was the longest school trip that I ever had and I would say the most enjoyable. Being this long of a trip made it easer for us to slow down from time to time when needed and just take a break despite all the cool things we were seeing.

 I think that the budget we had for the trip and our daily food was the perfect amount. In our group we had some left over even when we kept getting extra snacks and going to extra places and such. So really I thought that budget was the absolute perfect amount. The hostel that we had was really helpful with keeping the budget low. The cost of it was only 28 dollars per night with 12 people in one room, 4 people in another, and all the girls except for Carwai in the next one. So it was a real money saver. I personally thought the hostel over all was ok. I mean, we got used to it. And really it was in the perfect spot for us as we traveled around the city and it was really overall in the perfect position. I do prefer a hotel, but hostels are fine.

I thought that everything was well planned out, fun, and interesting. I think I have gained a lot of skills from this experience and I also learned how to tackle different thing in a completely different environment than what I am used to. I thought, over all, that this trip to San Francisco was the best school trip I have ever taken and I hope to have ones as good as this in the future.