It has been a month since I have called the beautiful renaissance city of Florence, Italy my home and I still can’t get over the fact that I can say that. From the food to the culture and everything in between, you could say that I am living my BEST Lizzie McGuire Movie life, (minus being on a high school field trip to Rome and having a pop star doppelgänger).
Everyday I fall more and more in love with Florence, but like every great love story that has ever existed, there are tiny problems the protagonist has to overcome. For my love story it is the time difference and the efforts to communicate with my loved ones as frequently as possible. Making time for communicating with those back home sounded like an easier task before my departure, but unfortunately it hasn’t been as such. Fortunately this protagonist is skilled with the fine art of planning and I was determined to make this time difference work with ease.
Florence is seven hours ahead of my family and six hours ahead of my friends, so to say that this would be a tad complicated is an understatement. It seems as if the only time my loved ones have time to catch up or chat on the phone is when I am already deep in my slumber. By the time I wake up and am ready to reply to whatever funny memes or texts anyone sends me they are still asleep…and will be for many more hours. After a week or two of playing telephone with everyone I loved, I thought of the idea to plan out my phone calls. Sounds easy, right? Wrong.
The expectations of everyone having the same schedule every day was completely unreasonable and a way to set myself up for failure. At the end of the day these were family and friends, not business partners. Although by the time their day began, mine was just about ending, I had to accept that this is the reality we have to live with for at least the next two and a half months. The easiest solution was to just go with it. I usually don’t get a text from them until 4 p.m. my time, which is 10 a.m. est and that isn’t the most difficult thing in the world to deal with. I started to think of it as “Hey, some people don’t have any family or friends to talk to,” and that changed everything.
Studying abroad brings many different challenges or obstacles you probably haven’t faced back at home- but this is the very reason why studying abroad is so special. It is an opportunity to gain a new worldly perspective on life, while also noticing the many privileges we all have. Although time difference puts a little bit of a damper on updating my friends and family on my “new life,” there are so many different ways to stay connected. Social media helps me share my day to day experiences with just about everybody before I even have to pick up the phone to FaceTime and tell everyone what I am doing. Being grateful for what you have and accepting that not everything can be controlled or planned out is key to being successful in adapting to your studies abroad.