Viewing home from elsewhere

By Samara Patel

Everyone around me is from, seemingly, the most interesting places in the world. Since coming to Durham, I’ve met people from all over the globe: the sun-soaked streets of Zambia, the ever-churning vibrancy of Berlin, the towering splendour of Dubai. In a student city where it seems like every other person is from London, a world-class city that always seemed magical to me as a Harry-Potter-loving kid, my hometown doesn’t nearly compare. It doesn’t have India’s centuries-old palaces, or Greece’s fine white beaches. I don’t even live in a place that anyone on this side of the world has ever heard of.

I live in a small town, an hour’s drive from Chicago. Not tiny enough for Gilmore Girls-esque coziness, and not big enough to have any form of public transportation. It’s a world of cars that move too fast over huge roads, ones that make British highways look like sidewalks in comparison. I’ve often heard people talk about America like it’s one giant movie set. But when I walk down my street, I don’t see beautiful skylines or people dramatically running through the rain. I see telephone poles, barren sidewalks, strip malls with signs that have clearly weathered a few tornadoes. If I have to drive somewhere that’s more than 10 minutes away, I’ll pass flat lands of wheat and cornfields, maybe a small red barn or two. It’s nothing like the mad rush of London with its tourists and flashing lights and any cuisine you can think of.

It’s always interesting to me how completely those around me dismiss their amazing hometowns. With Durham being such an international university, it’s impossible not to come across people with stories in settings you’ve always dreamed of setting foot in. Chicago is in the middle of a country that’s in the middle of nowhere, far from so many continents and cultures. The size of the U.S. is reflected in my town’s ever-growing number of petrol stations, in the Target that might as well be a warehouse, in the fact that I could drive for five hours and still have not crossed over into another state. In comparison, the compactness of the world on this side of the globe seems impossible, so many distinct cultures clustered into a collection of small countries.

The idea of elsewhere has always been attractive to me: somewhere I don’t have to go looking for entertainment, somewhere where adventure finds me instead. But of course, I’ll have to go home eventually, so a pessimistic view of my town isn’t helpful. Instead, I’ve decided to try and romanticize it. I want to see my town as all of my homesick international friends see theirs: as the pinnacle of what home looks like.

In my hometown, the houses are painted in a variety of colourful pastels. Sprawling ranch houses with plastic toys littering the front yard stand across from stoic half-mansions with elderly couples sitting on their porch chairs. In my hometown, it’s only a short drive away from twenty different independent coffee shops, each with their own charm and flavour of matcha. In the winter, the town centre is blanketed by snow and peppered with snowmen and strings of fairy lights. In my hometown, my parents sit on the back patio drinking Kool-Aid and watching my little brother run to the park through the open grass.

As I consider the ways that all of my friends’ cities are unique and worldly, I also consider how mundane it feels to them. A girl who lives near London’s central dislikes leaving the comfort of her house for the chaos of sweltering tube crowds. Someone in Luxembourg bemoans the smallness of her country, wishing for the excitement of her neighboring European cities. A friend in Malaysia finds the glowing skyscrapers of Kuala Lumpur to be desperately ordinary.

Though my hometown might be far, and its contents occasionally underwhelming, that makes me even more glad that I can be in England, even if all its residents think I’m crazy for thinking the UK is so magical. I’m grateful to have made friends from all over the world that tour me around their cities as if their giant castles and brilliant starscapes are mundane sights. Someday, I’ll convince them to visit me back by my own home. Maybe they’ll find my town to be as magical as I find theirs.

Image: Dave Hoefler via Unsplash.