On reflection
SA: CASA: Barcelona, Spain
Florence, one of the Semester Abroad Correspondents, shares her experience abroad during the Spring 2025 semester. Follow along with the group of correspondents on our blog and look out for their images on the @pennabroad Instagram feed.
One of the hardest parts of preparing for a semester abroad isn’t deciding how many pairs of jeans to pack or whether to check one or two bags on your international flight. Without a doubt, it’s determining how you’ll document your time abroad. Almost everyone will advise you to keep journal; but if you’re anything like me, despite a deep love for writing, I’ve never managed to consistently journal for more than a week. So, you quickly gravitate to options involving your phone.
When I applied to be a Global Correspondent, I did so not only to share my experience with the wider Penn community but also to give myself an excuse (albeit a very good one) to maintain a comprehensive digital record of my time abroad. I pictured meticulously edited blogs with sharp transitions and trendy music, “Day in the Life” videos styled after popular YouTubers, and a never-ending collage of photos capturing food, places, people, and art from across Europe. To that effect, I spent far too much of my winter break scrolling endlessly through YouTube and TikTok and watching countless content creators share their best tips on digital cameras for filmmaking, point-and-shoot photography, and vlogging.
But somewhere along the way, I got honest with myself and realized two things:
- I don’t actually want to be a content creator.
- There’s no point in spending thousands of dollars to create content for others if I’m not enjoying the experience of creating it for myself.
So, I closed every tab, rummaged through my family’s miscellaneous drawer, and pulled out my mom’s 2011 Nikon CoolPix S3100 digital camera. That, and nothing else, would be my tool for documenting my time abroad—and I’m extremely glad I made that choice.
Me and the Nikon
I started using my (mom’s) camera the minute I touched down in Barcelona. On my first day, I wandered around Poble Nou snapping photos of any and everything that begged for my attention: colorful buildings, gothic doors, edgy graffiti, and picturesque balconies. There was no plan or pattern, just instinct and pure curiosity.
That night, as I sat down to transfer all my photos from the camera to my laptop, I realized that I was a lot better at photography than I had expected. More importantly, I noticed that, without even trying, I had created an authentic record of the day’s sights and encounters. A canopy of trees beneath a clear blue sky, which I thought was a simple nature shot, revealed a group of Senegalese street merchants selling cowrie shell bracelets on La Rambla. A photo of the Torre Glòries doubled as evidence of my spontaneous trip to the Mercat dels Encants, where I ran into a friend from high school. And a picture of a cliff near Sant Jeroni, revealed an unassuming wooden cross—a symbol of Montserrat’s rich Catholic history. As each picture flashed across my screen I found myself back at the exact moment they were taken, reliving the emotions, sensations, and wonder of experiencing something new.
The truth about reflection
One important thing often left out of conversations about reflection and mindfulness while abroad is that, no matter the medium, your reflections should ultimately be for you, not for others. This means your journal shouldn’t feel like a nightly chore, opened only because you have to capture something for the future. Instead, it should be a space you excitedly return to when a moment, a meal, a smell, or an encounter strikes you, shakes you up, and forces you to confront some aspect of yourself that otherwise would go unaddressed.
For me, photography — the amateur, casual, and unassuming kind — became that space, reminding that as much as photos provide permanence, they are also fond markers of life lived and sights seen in a way that will never quite occur in the same way again.
There probably won’t be any state-of-the-art vlogs or expertly edited travel videos coming back to the States with me in May. But there certainly will be a catalog of hundreds of candid and imperfect pictures to fondly look back on. Each one reminding me not only of who I was in those moments, but also, of who those moments have made me.
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