Starting to feel like home

Any time you move to a new place you have to expect to feel out of place, out of sorts, and that everything is unfamiliar. Put that together with moving to a foreign country and you add a whole other dimension to the feeling of being an outsider that doesn’t quite belong. One of these things is not like the other? So you wait and watch for the small moments when something feels normal or familiar that tell you that maybe you can feel at home in your new surroundings. Yesterday evening as I unlocked the door and entered my flat and wondered where the smile on my face had come from I realized that I had just experienced one of those moments.

The rest of the story requires a little background. On my second day here I stepped into one of the many spice stores in the market looking for the basics…it’s amazing how little you can make when you have no salt, pepper, sugar. The man working there spoke English and gave me his business card in case I needed anything, but having my guard up in a strange place I tossed the card into the bottom of my bag and hadn’t thought of it since. That was until I decided that I wanted to make chicken noodle soup from scratch and needed some dried parsley. After a number of unsuccessful attempts at the shops near my building I ventured a little farther to first store I had been in since half the problem was that I didn’t know the word for parsley in Arabic. While the man I had originally met wasn’t there, another man, who also spoke English, and French for that matter, was and said that while he didn’t have any he could get it for me if I could come back later in the evening. So, a few hours later I ventured out to the market once again. This time they were both there although not with the dried parsley I was looking for. Apparently dried parsley can’t be bought here, but he did have some fresh parsley, which is not at all hard to find, he said would dry out in about 3 days. That was besides the point though as the first man I had met started asking me questions about the correspondence course he was taking and was studying for there in the shop. The next 45 minutes involved him pulling up a stool for me to sit on, asking someone to bring me some tea, then asking me explaining the price elasticity of demand lesson he was working on and other related topics I learned 4 years ago in Intro Microeconomics. As I got up to leave having reached the end of the handout he was working on he asked if the next lesson could be tomorrow…to which I gave the typical Egyptian response, God willing.

The feeling that I was no longer stranger here was already setting in when, as I had almost reached my street I heard a familiar voice and looked up to see one of the loan officers from the office, only adding to feeling that I might actually belong here.