A Tale of Two Homes

What is home? Is it a place? Is it food, a feeling or a bunch of people you love?
Finding a new home – while keeping your old one – is a challenge for international students.
Columnist Katherina Riesner debates what home means once we are abroad.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines home as “the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household”. For the compilers of the OED, it is mainly a place then. This raises the question: Has Lund become home? After having been here for only three months, I would say, not yet.

And for lots of exchange students their countries of origin will probably stay their home as they are going back after only five or ten months of living in Sweden. But is it not possible that they find a second home here, ‘a home away from home’, to which they will gladly return in a few years’ time and realize how comfortable they feel in the old surroundings? Isn’t that a definition of home, too?

For most international students it is hard to regard the new country as home because they initially leave family and friends behind. However, by meeting people in the new culture and making friends, this feeling slowly decreases and a novel type of home emerges. This leaves a lot of people torn between two cultures.

Whenever I am in Germany, for example, I yearn for Washington, D.C., which has long ago become my second home. When I miss it, it is difficult to describe what I am thinking of. It is a mixture of people I love, delicious food, great weather, my favorite sports and the sense of being free. Do I have to feel bad when I return to Germany and sense that I no longer completely belong there? In the most extreme cases, having two homes can leave you with having none at all because neither provides you with what you used to feel.

I remind myself that ‘home is where the heart is’, which means your actual location does not have any bearing on whether it is home or not. Instead, your feelings towards a place are more strongly valued than anything else. So it does not matter where you come from and if your stay is only temporary.

By getting involved in the community, spending time with Swedes, eating local food, learning Swedish and fully immersing yourself in the culture, Sweden can become your new home. If you take action, you can arrive. With all your heart.

In the end, however, the elusive term home remains vague. Everyone has a different conception of what home is. For me, it is the smell of my parents’ house, the sounds of the ambulances driving by in D.C., and soon it might be the taste of homemade kanelbullar. One thing is for certain, though, the OED’s definition does not nearly cover the connotations and associations that home has for most of us.