Coming Home to Schweinfurt.

How long does it take for a new place to start feeling like home? Probably not long if you’ve only moved across town, but it took seven months for me after we moved across an ocean. I wasn’t sure that Schweinfurt would ever feel like home during the 13 months we planned to live here, but yet I started having unexpectedly warm fuzzy feelings about going home at the end of a long train ride back from Berlin.

Perhaps the strangest thing about those emotions for me is that we live in a hotel. How could I ever feel like a hotel was actually my home? I remember how frustrated I was when I first found out that Mr. Meena’s company was placing us into a hotel. Did you know that the word hotel comes from the French word hôtel, which indicates a building that has frequent visitors but doesn’t offer lodging? This place, this hotel, is meant for temporary visits – for those that are just passing through. As I mentioned in this post, there are always guests coming and going from our place of residence. We know it’s time for them to check out when we hear the rolling of a suitcase, the frequent slamming of the doors, and the ding of the elevator. But not us, we’re here for the long haul.

So how is it that this hotel has come to feel like a home? If you were to ask the owners they’d probably tell you that it’s because the hotel is more like a boarding house, but their online listings (and high turnover) tell a different story. My guess is that we achieved a measure of home by modifying our rooms as much as possible and rearranging the furniture in endless attempts to try and make it seem right to us. We even stole (ahem, asked for) a nice chair from the lobby to make the place more comfortable. I suppose that when you return to the same place day after day and month after month, it starts to represent more than just a place to sleep (even when you’d rather be sleeping somewhere else). Plenty of the unpleasant aspects of our ‘home’ might not be that different from someone with a white picket fence reality. Whereas that homeowner might walk out their front door and make eye contact with their least favorite neighbor, I’m heading out my door amidst the chaos of my least favorite cleaning lady.

It’s a good lesson that you can be satisfied wherever you are – if you choose to be. Maybe today you’re wishing for a more upscale apartment across town or a house with one more bedroom. We all would happily accept an upgrade, right? But there’s peace in accepting that your home is where you are and it’s more than just a building with walls and furniture. It’s what you choose to create there and who you choose to create it with.

Perhaps the more puzzling question is how Schweinfurt has come to feel like home. We moved to a small German city where nothing feels familiar. We traded southern hospitality for a survival of the fittest mentality when it comes to standing in line. Strange fiberglass pigs waited to greet us in this foreign city as we first began to learn our way around. Yet somehow we’ve developed favorite places to shop, order a Brötchen, get coffee, and stop for ice cream.

You could say that this is home because we are here together (and with our pet bird), but I think there’s more to it than that. I think that Schweinfurt feels like home because we’ve made an effort to establish our life here. We haven’t spent our time counting down the days until we can leave (although there has been plenty of homesickness going around) but instead counted the experiences that we’ve been able to enjoy. We may have given up the majority of our material possessions, at least temporarily, but we didn’t give up the things that really matter to us (family, quality time, having fun together).

It’s never going to be easy for an expat to feel at home. But eventually, if you keep trying, maybe you’ll find yourself returning to the place where you live with warm fuzzy feelings of your own.

Have you recently relocated? What helped you feel at home?