[Student Voices] Paris Unplanned
Siyul Yu (Chojeon Elementary School, Grade 6)
by Siyul Yu (Chojeon Elementary School, Grade 6)
As I awoke on the bed of the hotel room, I could feel the sunlight welcoming me to a fresh new day with its dazzling smile. The air was moisture-free, unlike the July weather in Korea. It was the fifth day of a trip to Paris with my family. This was the second-to-last day, a shopping day. We went to Galeries Lafayette and Le Marais. My mother was enjoying the shopping spree, gleefully zig-zagging between stores while my dad ran from corner to corner to follow her. When we finally headed back towards the hotel, my dad and I were tired and trudging along as we tried to keep up with Mom. As we arrived at the hotel, my heart almost stopped. Our belongings had been pulled out of the hotel room and piled in the lobby.
We stood there petrified. Me, my dad and my mom—unable to speak or hear.
My eyes darted around the lobby trying to figure out why our luggage was all over the floor. The hotel manager explained that the check-out time for the hotel was 1 p.m. Then it hit me: as we were planning the trip to Paris, we confused the international date line. We calculated the date wrong! This meant we booked the hotel for only five days instead of six. Thus, we needed to book a new hotel room—fast. If we couldn’t find a hotel room, we’d have to sleep in the street.
This episode still leaves me with my palms sweating when I think of it. I can remember it today as clear as crystal. Yet, I learned something from my trip to Paris: the importance of planning.
To craft a good plan, the first factor to consider is time. People almost always underestimate the time it takes to do something. This phenomenon is what psychologists call the “planning fallacy.” For example, when we bought a pass that gave us access to Paris’s top museums and galleries, we thought we could see everything in two days. As it turned out, we underestimated how long it would take to walk long distances and stop for meals, so we could not visit Orangerie—the art gallery famous for Claude Monet’s Water Lilies paintings.
As Dwight D. Eisenhower phrased it: “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” This means that planning can help you adjust to unexpected situations. In Paris, there were Black Lives Matter demonstrations because of a fatal police shooting of a teenager of North African descent. Therefore, we could not go outside at night due to worries about violence. These kinds of unexpected variables regularly occur in real-life situations. The more you plan, the better you can adapt to surprises.
Thankfully, our near-disaster in Paris was resolved by the kind hotel manager who found another hotel that had one room left. From this, we learned the most important lesson of all: always check your plan twice. This step is simple, but it’s often neglected. If we had looked again at our hotel confirmation and counted 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 nights—a process that would have only taken a few seconds—this problem would not have happened in the first place.
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
To write comments, please log in to one of the accounts.
Standards Board Policy (0/250자)