Viaggio in Italia

So I've done quite a bit of traveling lately... The weekend before last a roommate and I spent the weekend in Umbria, mostly in Perugia but also in a little medieval hill town called Gubbio. Last weekend three of my roommates and I, along with a Brown friend in Florence, spent four days in Barcelona. And then today I just got back from a little day trip to Parma, which is just an hour away from Bologna. All of it has been awesome, but by this weekend I really felt like I needed a break from traveling to just chill in Bologna for a little while. With the weekends full of traveling and six hours of class every day during the week, I'm feeling kind of exhausted.

But now our nearly-month-long spring break starts next weekend, and my roommates are stressing out trying to figure out travel plans. I'll have a little over a week before I meet my parents in London to head to Morocco, and I'm not sure what I want to do with that time. We were talking until recently about going to Sicily, and maybe dropping in on other parts of the South on our way down there, but my roommate's mother basically told her she wasn't allowed to go to the South because she thinks it's too unsafe. (The idea that southern Italy is too unsafe seems a little ridiculous when I have friends studying abroad in places like South Africa, Egypt, and Israel. Not to mention the fact that my roommate is twenty and half a world away from home, yet she still lets her mom decide where she can and cannot go in Europe. But I digress.)

Anyway, now we're lost as to what we should do for that period. There are financial limitations to consider, since it's kind of last minute and flights across Europe are expensive. Plus, we all have different ideas about where we want to go. Eric really wants to go to London and Berlin, but Dana's just been to London and isn't so hot on Berlin. She wants to see Austria and Switzerland. I really want to see Budapest, and Dublin. And certainly southern Italy.

Dana's proposing a compromise where we go up to Trieste, in the northeastern corner of Italy, then take the train from there to Vienna and then to Budapest. I appreciate her willingness to figure out a compromise, but I'm wondering whether it might be better for me to kind of ditch them and travel on my own. I like traveling with friends, but having to compromise three or more ways over every little decision, when everyone involved has different interests and priorities, gets a little tiring. I'm realizing that I don't have all that much time in Europe and if I plan to accomplish all that I really want to, I'm going to have to come up with a strategy and maybe branch out on my own. It's a little tricky because Dana's mom is really set on her not traveling alone, so if I go off on trips by myself it may mean leaving her all by herself in Bologna. But I also don' t want to organize my plans around her interests just so that I can be her constant chaperone.

We'll see how it goes. Tomorrow, I'll post some of my photos from Barcelona, Perugia, and Padova. Right nows it seems like there's so many that I can't even handle them all. But I'll be sure to get on that tomorrow.