Row, Row, Row Your Boat

This morning, I finally got to sleep in, it felt great. Then, I calmly got up, took a shower and got ready to go canoeing. CANOEING IS DIFFICULT. I was in the back and that meant I had to steer, but I didn’t really understand how to or what I was really supposed to be doing. It was so much fun though! We really need these kinds of outlets on the weekends, especially because we’re under so much stress during the weekdays. After that we went to lunch at a restaurant right next to the lake called The Boatyard.

Our only assignment this weekend was to provide someone with a service. In other words, a service learning project. I came back on campus and ran into one of my group members outside our dorm hall, and we decided to clean some people’s rooms as a service learning project. Since we were already standing next to some of our friends we went upstairs and cleaned two rooms. We did everything from making beds to vacuuming, I think what we really learned, is that people actually really appreciate it when you do things for them. Just to do it, like, kind gestures are really greatly appreciated, and they make you feel valued. There were people doing things all day, laundry, folding clothes, cleaning hallways, dorm rooms, handing people trays in the dinning hall, giving people drinks, and it really makes us stand out. People know we’re hoteliers because we’re all doing the same thing. My personal service learning project was buying my friend Tucker a slurpie. He didn’t have any money on him and he had just come back from playing soccer, so I bought him his drink. He opened doors for me as part of his service learning.

Now, I’m just sitting in the lounge slightly mentally preparing myself for the week to come. It’s our last week here, and now I feel attached to the people here. I mean, this week was the attachment week I just feel like I’ve known my friends for so much longer than I actually have, and I’m really going to miss all of them. But, these are people I’m going to know for the rest of my life. They’re people I’m always going to talk to. And they’re people that live all across the world. It’s a good feeling knowing that if you go to where some of these people live, you will already have a friend there. On top of that, a lot of these kids want to come back to Cornell, they want to come to the hotel school, and if I come back and go to the hotel school, they’re going to be here too. It’s just, a different way of thinking about it now, I love it.