15 Sep Creative Ideas to Share Your Time Abroad

A common obstacle that many bloggers run into is running out of inspiration. After a few months or years, the newness wears off, work routines settle in and the cultural differences are second nature, so blog posts frequency trails off until it’s time to go home. The blogger returns home and reminisces about their time abroad and goes back to their blog to try and remember all the little things they forgot about. And the posts kind of peter out. That doesn’t have to be the end of the blog though!

Blogging abroad doesn’t just have to happen while the blogger is physically away from their home country; blogging abroad can encompass all of the things relating to time spent away. And with the wide variety of creative expressions out there, blogging doesn’t just have to be words, pictures and videos.

Here are some ideas on how to creatively process experiences abroad, even after you’ve returned home.

Compose Songs

Maybe you spent your downtime abroad learning how to play some simple songs on the guitar. Or maybe you picked up a local instrument to foster a connection with your school’s music class. Or maybe you were making music for years before you went overseas. Either way, writing songs can be a great way to commemorate some of those relationships or experiences that are hard to explain through a blog post.

Keith May wrote and recorded an entire album, “127 Daughters,” about his time teaching English at a university in China, and is reaching a new audience by playing small shows in his hometown.

You don’t have to do a full album, it could just be a song that you post occasionally, but music is a great way to share your cultural experience.

Create Visual Art

Sometimes you’re too busy taking everything in and enjoying the experience to take out your camera to capture it all. Other times you have a decent picture but you can’t quite get the lighting right or get rid of the blur. Maybe you had a small sketchbook with you the whole time you were abroad. Sketching, drawing or painting these memories from your experiences can be another way to share the things that really stand out about your time abroad.

They don’t have to be big, grand scenes, they can be the small, intimate moments of how the woman at the market was always hunched over her table of vegetables or the student on the side of the volleyball court who kept score. Of course, it could also be that gorgeous sunset that you saw everyday. Either way, visual art can create a new window into the culture you spent so much time in.

Make a Comic

Everyone who’s ever lived abroad has small stories to tell, and some of them take a lot of time to set up – by setting the scene, explaining who was there and the social cues and reaction of the other people. You can side step all of that through illustrating these stories in a comic form.

It’s the ultimate way to “show, not tell” what was happening at the time, and an easy way to highlight cultural differences (people dressed differently, facial expressions, etc.) that are difficult to work into a written story.

A fun thing could be creating the comics chronicling your time abroad, allowing the subtle changes in your own behavior, dress and reactions show in the art work. While not a comic about a time abroad, Rocket Llama, a thru-hiker on the Pacific Crest Trail, is illustrating her time long-distance hiking which can provide some inspiration.

Image courtesy of Rocket Llama

There are lots of other ways to get creative with sharing your cultural experience abroad. Here are some other ideas which you could always share online in a photo or video clip:

• Embroidery
• Wood carving
• Sewing
• Pottery
• Dub poetry
• Collage on objects
• Tree ornaments

What are some creative hobbies you have that you could use to share about your time abroad on your blog?

This is a guest post by Christine Bedenis, a well-traveled twenty-something from the Midwest. She is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Thailand), now living in Ghana, and was a winner of Peace Corps’s annual Blog It Home contest in 2014.