It’s hard to point to the exact moment when a place loses its strangeness and becomes home, when you can walk into the doorway of a previously unfamiliar room or apartment and feel like you know it: all the switches and plug points and creaky windows, the sound of concealed water pipes and the idiosyncracies of appliances, the smell of the upholstery and the texture of the walls. Or take the streets, where you go from being someone who pauses uncertainly at the pedestrian signal and watch what the others do, to confidently tapping the contraption on the pole like you’d done it since kindergarten. Or the café at the corner where you need to ask, in slow and halting foreign-speak, for the simplest beverage and a pastry whose ingredients are written into its name, but come to putting a couple of coins on the counter and picking up your café crema and walnut brötchen.
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It’s a beautiful winter morning, crisp and blue, the kind that invigorates and makes me feel like it’s a wonderful world (even though, in the country called home, there’s trouble in the air and on the streets). I can see through the window of this warm café the limited but still noticeable diversity of this neighbourhood. Young people walk by, backpacked and earplugged, older ones trundle their walkers-cum-shopping carts, and parents on their bicycles bundle their children on accompanying mini-wheels or in impossibly large carts hitched to theirs. The bi-weekly market on the small square is coming alive stalls and carts selling fruit, cheese, bread, flowers and meats, all placed around six cast-iron sculptures that seem to be bemoaning the state of humankind. I wave a guten tag to the Syrian couple who runs a falafel and shawarma place round the corner, whose warmth made me a little less cold on my first dark evening here.
I come to the café now and then to feel like I am part of something, a sense of community, maybe. There’s something about the smell of bread and coffee and clutches of people in conversation that makes one believe that even though you’re by yourself, you don’t need to feel alone (I do admit, the opposite is also possible, that even when you are with others, you can feel alone). When you’re far from home there is a need to become familiar, with things, with people, with processes, with places. To make a home out of somewhere that is not. To find a space and occupy it with confidence.
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Getting off the No. 28 Bus at the last stop, I walk down the wide grey street flanked by closed red brick buildings on one side and a brackish stream on the other. There’s an imposing tower, slim and flecked with red lights, that can be seen from pretty much everywhere on campus, and glimpsing which I once got off at the wrong stop and walked a kilometer instead of the usual half. I check the map on my phone and turn right where I’m told. Number 4 Linzer Strasse is supposed to be right there; I can see Number 2 and 3 across from each other but the next one’s 5. I ask the one person I see who’s stepped out of 3 for a smoke; he shrugs his jacketed shoulders and says “It should be right here, no”. The red balloon on the phone map says so too. I finally peel the anxious unfamiliarity off my gaze and read the street signs. Indeed, it’s right there, I just had to look in the other direction. Sometimes the acute sense of one’s foreignness limits the capacity to see, hear and read, it seems.
At the Centre, I’m given keys and stationery, and shown to a room at the end of a quiet corridor. It’s bare but functional, and is occasionally occupied by the one other fellow who like me is visiting for a month. When he is there, we exchange ideas and experiences; when he’s not, it’s me and the network on my computer—social, commercial and informational. The secretary across the hallway peeps in to say a cheery “Allo!” on the days she is here. Each morning, I settle in to make myself productive; access to the much richer library resources help. I work on my talk, give that, and work some more on my paper. I go to lunch with one of the professors, and we take a short cut through a gap in the wire fencing that reduces the path by several hundred metres.
The next day, I use that short cut when I come to work. And it makes me feel just a little bit more like I belong.
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Losing the knot of anxiety in your stomach when you sit on the bus, not being afraid anymore that you’ll miss your stop. Identifying the value of the coins by their shape and weight, not having to fumble and peer and count ineptly at the shop register. Being able to listen to a podcast as you walk, to look up at the stark branches of the bare trees, at the street art and not worry about being too distracted to turn where you need to. Finding all the things on your grocery list without using the translation app.
And returning the greeting when the girl at the café smiles at you like she’s known you a long time, and says something that sounds much like “cheers” with a delightful lilt....
Just when it’s time to go home, it begins to feel like home.
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