A Broad in Venice: Time flies when you don’t have much of it

From the moment this column publishes, I will have less than two weeks remaining on my study abroad experience in Venice, Italy. It feels like I got here yesterday, and I’m leaving tomorrow.

I simply can’t believe that it’s all going to be over so soon. And now that it is all coming to a close, the list of things I wish I could do is getting longer and longer.

Sure, attending class from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday takes a good chunk of time out of your experience, but I now wish I had managed my weekends better.

Fewer mornings sleeping in, fewer afternoons dawdling around the island, fewer evenings spent patting my belly after gorging on Italian pasta dishes.

My advice to students doing abroad trips in the future: plan your time as precisely as possible. Read your guidebooks before you go so you have a definite idea of the things you would like to see while you are in a foreign land. Talk yourself out of lazy afternoons and see how much you can pack into your adventure.

I finally sat down and composed a list of things I still wanted to see, and it’s way longer than time will allow for. I still have museums, exhibits, churches and entire towns that I would like to visit. There are still whole areas of the island that I haven’t explored yet and gardens I haven’t seen.

Even with my calendar in front of me, it’s hard to consider how much time I actually have. Wrapping up this experience also means wrapping up my course work, in my case, six credit hours worth of studio art classes.

We are all working full speed ahead on our final projects, requiring late nights in the printmaking shop and eliminating the option of missing any class days.

This past weekend my classmates and I made a massive effort to catch up on some of our lost time.

Everyday we saw multiple art exhibits associated with the Biennale Festival, took a boat to a different island for some sort of tour, then returned to accomplish even more on the island.

By the time I finally laid my head down to sleep each night, the memories of the morning seemed like distant journeys.

One of the coolest things about staying in Europe is that the train system is extremely comprehensive. You can catch a reasonably priced train to cities all over your area with comparable ease. My classmates and I have used the trains to visit Florence, Verona and Padua, but of course I also wanted to see Milan, Rome and the Dolomite mountains.

Now with one Saturday remaining in my trip, I have time to feasibly schedule one last great adventure.

Visiting the fashion capital of the world sounds nice, or the site of ancient history dating back beyond natural comprehension.

But I have to be honest with myself, all of my previous substantial life adventures have been based around mountains and it would be wrong if this one didn’t at least feature them.

But I could have done it all if I had planned better, and that’s a hard fact to face. If I could change one thing about this experience, it would be how I managed my free time.

I guess I never realized that our time here would expire so quickly. But that’s the thing about abroad trips. Time flies when you don’t have much of it.