Home After Ten Years Abroad

Thoughts On Home in Romania, Germany, Switzerland, and The Netherlands.

“I was also searching for a house in which I could live and work and make a world at my own pace, but even in my imagination this home was blurred, undefined, not real, or not realistic, or lacked realism.”

“Sometimes I would sprinkle sea salt on a wedge sour green tomato and dip it into the peppery emerald olive oil. It was as if I had struck on something good that was within my reach.”

― Deborah Levy, Real Estate

I believe that our search for home and whether we allow ourselves to arrive there is deeply rooted in our imagination, or in the lack of it.

After ten years of living abroad in three European countries, I’ve realized that I feel at home wherever I can cultivate and, most importantly, sustain a rich interior life.

Beyond safety, comfort, and close proximity to the people I love, I also imagine home as a place where my imagination is nourished, a place where I have the freedom and luxury to tap into a rich inner world. A place in which I can “dare to declare who I am,” as Hildegard of Bingen beautifully puts it: “Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep."

This year, I’m celebrating and contemplating ten years of living abroad. I left my home country, Romania, in the early autumn of 2015, at 22, with the sole desire to study in Berlin and eventually return. Since then, I’ve called three different countries home: Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

In this brief post, I’d like to reflect on what home felt like in each country I’ve lived in over these years. Perhaps, I will spend more time weaving places and time together in a way that brings more stories, in a longer essay at some point later this year.

Romania

Every time I return home to visit my parents in Romania, usually in late spring and over the summer, they religiously ask me what I’d like to eat the moment I arrive. Almost always, I reply: “Salată de vinete și roșii din alea care au gust, din piață” / “Roasted aubergine dip and those delicious tomatoes from the market.”

Once, when my dad visited me abroad by car, I asked him to bring a basket full of those tomatoes: the taste of home. He joyfully complied.

Romania, for me, is a deeply sensorial memory, it’s the taste of something good, something hard to find elsewhere unless I return to my roots.

In a previous essay, I explored my relationship with Romania through post-communist places, and I also wanted to see it through the eyes of a villager, Mica, in the place where my grandfather was born and lived a good portion of his life.

In these years abroad, I returned to live for a few months in Brașov, a mountain town in the Carpathian Mountains, an “intermezzo place,” as I love to call it, while I was thinking about my next place to call home.

Switzerland

Last year, after the Flâneurs Project Gathering that I held in The Hague, one of the participants, Christoph, a Swiss man who lives in Basel, sent me a book by Shelby Stuart: Schwyz. Uri. Unterwalden. It took me nine months to actually start reading this very brief book - not out of lack of curiosity or time, but because of the pit in my stomach every time it reminded me of the home I had left behind there, in Schwyz.

Home in Switzerland meant an unending reservoir of natural beauty, in which I was a privileged spectator - a home identical to Turner’s paintings, ridiculously potent, cinematic, and vast. Living there during the pandemic, and through tough personal times, felt like an out-of-time experience - two full years felt like two full decades.

Imagination-wise, Switzerland gave me a taste of remote, overwhelming beauty, but what was missing was close human connection, I felt profoundly alone. I left to embark on a sabbatical, which I wrote about in this essay published a year ago.

However, there’s something about this place, this country, that still stirs my imagination in ways that not many places do. Somehow, I know that at some point, if life is long and good, I will live there again.

Germany

Unpacking what home felt like for me in Germany was more difficult than I expected. Berlin was the place where I lived the longest abroad, yet the sense of home I felt there still feels blurred, hard to grasp, to remember.

Home, for me, was walking around Fehrbelliner Straße early in the mornings, long evenings spent writing at Weinerei Platz, and weekends at the market in Boxhagener Platz. Thinking about it, the feeling of home in Berlin is bound exclusively to a few places, rather than to sensory experiences, as in Romania or Switzerland.

I ceaselessly, obsessively walked this city, and even after almost five years, I still think I could find my way on every street.

The Netherlands

When I arrived here two and a half years ago, more precisely in The Hague, the soundscape felt like arriving home, even though I had never lived in a city by the sea before. By soundscape, I mean the near and far screeches of seagulls covering the sky and the North Sea Wind.

The Dutch brick architecture, the proximity to the sea, and the seagulls reminded me of places I’ve visited in the UK, which brought me comfort. Although I’ve never lived in the UK, I visit once a year, and my body always feels so relaxed and at home there.

Only recently has The Hague started to feel like home. In the past months, my imagination has begun to feel more expansive again, and this has ultimately affected how I view my everyday life here, how I actively engage with this city.

Home, Now

I cannot place the feeling of home in a singular, physical location. If I had to, it would most likely be a house somewhere in Romania, a home base in a secluded, quiet village where I could return for a few weeks or a month each year. Home there, in the Eastern European countryside, is deep quietness, an expanded sense of time, a restorative rhythm of life.

As for home as an experience to be lived, it is wherever I dare to declare myself and where I can delight in my imagination.

Thank you for reading.

I will be in Washington, D.C., from March 13 to 18 for an Emergent Ventures Unconference. If you're around and would like to grab a coffee, send me an email.

Patricia-Andra Hurducaș