My family never left America. Not once growing up, and not for lack of curiosity, it just was not something we did. So when the chance to study abroad came up through the University of Alabama, the whole idea sat strangely in my head, like something that happened to other people’s families. College had already taught me to say yes to things I would have flinched at in high school, and this was the biggest version of that yet.
The plan was to fly to Spain alone, meet my travel partner Lucas in Barcelona, and figure out the rest. The night before, my brain ran the same loop. Do I have my passport? Do I have my charger? Was my Spanish actually going to hold up? I packed and repacked twice before I left.
Fifteen hours of layovers and flights later, I landed in Madrid with one day to explore before the train to Barcelona. I took an Uber into the city and immediately understood I had no reference point for what I was looking at. The buildings were older than anything I had grown up around, and they were old in a way that felt lived in rather than preserved. I passed the Alcalá Gate and just stared at it, a stone arch from the 1700s sitting in the middle of a roundabout with cars circling it like it was a normal Tuesday. People at the cafés ate slowly, and nobody was on their phone in the way I was used to seeing back home. The parks were the size of midtown Manhattan blocks, which mattered to me because running is the thing I do to clear my head, and I started mentally mapping routes before I had even checked in anywhere.
By that evening, I was on a train to Barcelona, and Lucas was waiting for me at the station when I got in. The city was louder than Madrid, in a good way. Tourists everywhere, restaurants spilling onto the sidewalks, people taking pictures of buildings I had not even noticed yet.
We went to the Sagrada Família first. I had seen pictures, but pictures do not prepare you for the scale, or for the fact that it is still being built more than a century after they started. Standing under it, I kept thinking about how many generations of stonemasons and architects have worked on the same building and will never see it finished.
We wandered into other cathedrals almost by accident, Gothic and Romanesque ones tucked between regular streets, the kind of buildings that would be a national landmark back home and were just sort of there. Then we went to the beach to try seafood, which I had somehow never really had before. We ordered Zarzuela de Mariscos, a Catalan stew with lobster, shrimp, and mussels in a rich tomato broth.
Somewhere between the cathedrals and the beach, we stumbled into the White Rabbit, an immersive art space tucked into a side street. The whole thing is built by a rotating group of contemporary artists, each given a room or a hallway to do whatever they want with, whether that means projection mapping, sound installations, or sculpture you can walk through. You move from one piece to the next without any warning about what is coming. It was the kind of place I would never have walked into on purpose and probably loved more because of it.
On our last day, we climbed up to Montjuïc Castle. From the top, you can see the whole city pressed against the water, the harbor full of ships, the cathedrals we had walked through earlier reduced to small spikes in the skyline.
Barcelona was not even the main experience. It was the warm-up for Lisbon, and the flight there is where the trip caught up with me. I kept comparing what I had seen to something back in the US, and every comparison broke down within a sentence. The Sagrada Família was like, no. The parks in Madrid reminded me of, no. Barcelona at night felt a little like, no. I kept trying anyway, because that is how my brain wanted to handle it, filing the new thing under something familiar so it would stop being so disorienting. The part I had been fighting was the part I had come for, and I had been treating it as the problem the whole time.
Now, for my next stop in Lisbon, I plan to embrace these differences without comparisons. To see each thing for what it is and recognize that these countries have unique and distinctive aspects that I can experience alongside the rest of my study abroad group. The comparisons that kept breaking turned out to be a good thing because they revealed exactly what you want to get out of studying abroad — a global perspective I have never had before.