My Time in Granada, Spain: Discovery, Poetry, and Reflection

When students picture their semester abroad, they often imagine constant movement: weekend trips, crowded bars, and group excursions. While I certainly had those moments, my study abroad experience in Granada, Spain, was made all the more valuable by something quiet, yet infinitely profound that I found through writing.

Me seated at Mirador de San Miguel

Before arriving in Granada, I was nervous about the typical things, like making friends, navigating the new language, and fitting in.  But along with these normal stressors was a lot of anxiety that I was trying to leave behind, coming freshly out of a two-year relationship. Realizing that I would be 5,000 miles from home was both worrying and freeing, but I was hopeful I could make it an opportunity for self-growth. Through journaling, and a lot of self-motivation, I experienced a life-changing and complete study abroad experience, completing a month-long poetry-project, visiting four different countries and 15 different cities in Spain, and learning valuable things through introspection.

Navigating Identity Abroad

In the interest of self-discovery and as an LGBT student, I wanted to take my opportunity abroad as the perfect time to find and connect with LGBT communities and culture, a huge community that I had scarcely been involved with before. As a smaller city, Granada surprised me. It is a vibrant yet historic college town with a massive student population, creating an atmosphere that felt beautifully Spanish and youthfully open. I was able to find a lot of openness to LGBT people and to love in general. In fact, one of my largest culture shocks coming to Spain was the amount of PDA!  I was even lucky enough to find an LGBT community a stone's throw from my housing! I’ll talk about that one more later.

There was a distinct welcomeness that came with being an international student in Granada.  I was among countless other international students, and experienced the great hospitality that Andalusia is often known for. In this welcoming community with distance from my usual environment I had space to explore and reflect. I fell deeply in love with the city and it acted as the perfect place to grow. 

A Poem a Day

As a creative project, and to help self-reflect, I set a challenge for myself, I would write a poem every single day of April. I had learned that April was National Poetry Month, and since I was already processing so much emotion regarding my life back home and my new life in Spain, it made sense to channel that into art.

Writing became a lovely part of my daily routine, where it had prior just been an occasional habit. I found myself shopping in wonderful little papelerias, buying notebooks and art supplies. I really loved this project; my notebooks forced me to stop and look at the details of the city, the architecture, the smells, the sounds. One afternoon, while wandering through the city, I wrote an entry for "Poem in Your Pocket Day" that captured the surreal feeling of experiencing new things and connecting them to old loves.

Across a narrow sea

In a bazaar of salts and soaps

I see only purple, smell only lavender

In a world of scents and colors,

Through countless city streets

Strange and foreign from my own

I see architectural wonders

Every building, seems sketched by you

50 feet from where I sleep

5000 miles from home

As I shop for you in this papeleria,

The speakers play our songs.

It's hard to see new cities

It's hard to travel far

Not because of memories

Or because reminders hurt

But when you make the world

An inspiration, everywhere I go,

A million poems lodge inside me

Thousands more than you could know

This practice of journaling and poetry allowed me to capture the nuance of my semester. Some days I felt fierce longing for home; other days I felt an explosion of hope for the future. But I always felt better and more motivated to experience the world after my writing.  If you are a creative person, or even if you aren't, I highly recommend keeping a journal while studying abroad. It turns your semester from a blur of memories into a tangible history of your growth.

A quick sketch and haiku while on a walk

Finding Community

Of course, everything is best enjoyed when you have a community to experience it with. I lived with a roommate, and our program provided three meals a day. These shared meals became a great anchor for my social life. It was effortless to connect with other students over dinner, discussing our classes or planning our nights out.  This was always nice if I took a solo trip, got sick, or just spent some time by myself for a few days. I knew I could find people in the dining room and catch up.

We would spend evenings exploring Granada’s famous free tapas culture, walking to local events that would often be advertised on fliers at school or around the city, or simply hiking up the steep cobbled roads of the Arabic district to view the Alhambra at sunset. The balance between my solitary poetry writing and these social evenings made the semester feel sustainable and complete.

I was even able to participate in a drag performance!

One interesting highlight of my time in Granada allowed me to further experience LGBT culture.  Through luck, an LGBT establishment happened to be in one my favorite nearby courtyards and I would often go in to say hello, eventually befriending the staff.  I made many friends and met very interesting people in a place that allowed me to experience local LGBT life.

I also found a few regular social groups or events that really helped keep me grounded if socializing became hard. I attended a weekly language exchange where I was able to meet all kinds of different people, all while practicing my Spanish.  I also liked to attend weekly music nights and chess nights at an establishment just one street over from my housing!  Overall Granada and CEA CAPA made it easy to find and build a community for myself.

I loved my routines. Between my morning and afternoon classes, I would stop at a small breakfast spot called Cafe Las Flores. For just four euros, I’d order coffee, orange juice, and two tostadas de jamón. On other days, I might grab churros con chocolate and sit in a nearby park, often journaling or reading books at this time. If I didn't need to catch up on homework between classes that is.  I also LOVED my walks, walking through Albaicín, a cobbled winding district of the city, or through one of the many beautiful parks, will always be a highlight of my trip. One of my favorite things ever was when the waitress started knowing my order, nothing made me feel more at home.

My go-to breakfast order

Let Yourself Change

If I could give one piece of advice to prospective students, especially those exploring their identity, it is this: let yourself change.

You don't need to have everything figured out before you board the plane. You might feel lost sometimes, but as I wrote in my journal toward the end of my trip, "In college, it's normal to become something new.” Granada gave me the culture, the adventure, and the space to build a better version of myself, one who is more confident, experienced, and has another semester of college credit (Whooo Whoooh!).

A park I would often walk to and write at

Studying abroad is the perfect time to write your own story or even, your own poem. <3

Today

With friends

We wandered up

A steep cobbled road

That was canopied by trees.

We happened to a wooded park

Where poetry was pressed into the stones.

You would have loved it there, and noticed

How the world was speaking with you.

Noticed through the air that those

Flowers my friends had

Called lavender were

Just rosemary

blooming.

This post was written by Colby Schoenborn, an Alumni Ambassador from the University of Utah who studied abroad in Granada, Spain.