How to cook a watermelon
Only a foot away from one another and yet so far
Back in the days when my days consisted of traveling, I spent 80 if not 90% of my work days on the road. Sometimes also weekends. One time my boss called me on a Friday evening o tell me that I needed to be in Moscow on Monday morning for a meeting. So I spent the weekend preparing the deck and flew out Sunday night to arrive at the crack of dawn and be at the meeting in time. I consider myself lucky that my job took me to lesser travelled corners of the world. Batumi in Georgia (the country, not the US state), Samara in Russia and Astana in Kazakhstan to call out the more unusual ones. It’s always mind-boggling to see and experience how differently we all live. I always assumed that everbody had access to the same opportunities and same life. But no.
Many encounters have left an impression on me. Like the driver that one of the Russian hotels had sent to the airport to pick me up at night. A 6ft 4 tall guy, snow white hair and steel blue eyes. No words, no facial expressions, no smile. Just a sign that held my name. I was wondering if that was going to be one of the cases where they pretend to be the driver and take you to the woods to kill you or ask for ransom. I was calling my friend in Germany just to not freak out too much as we were driving through the birch forest outside of Moscow. I made it through but if there ever was a moment I feared for my life, that was it.
Another encounter that sticks out to me was with a taxi driver in Berlin. As so many taxi drivers in Germany, he was Turkish. We talked a little bit bonding over the fact that I was living in Istanbul at that time. He mentioned that he had been in Germany for a while, but Berlin more recently. His uncle had lived in the West Germany part of Berlin for a long time running a little corner store. It was a special time when the wall fell, when West and East Germans came together. On one of the first few days, somebody picked up a watermelon in his store and when checking out asked him: How do you cook this?
How crazy is this! He may have only stepped a few blocks away from where he lived, but a whole new world opened up. He was still be living in the same house, but it wasn’t the same home. I grew up in what’s now the smack middle of Germany. But when I grew up, it wasn’t. It was in the East of West Germany and it only took a short drive to get to the border. I remember packing our Korean relatives who were there to visit over summer into the car and driving up to the fence, pointing into nothing and saying “that’s East Germany”. When the border first opened, we drove to the closest East Germany town out of curiosity to see what it was like. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but it felt different.
There was no border keeping us from traveling anywhere in West Germany, but in some regards my family was still living a world apart from most people around us. Sometimes it’s a physical border and sometimes it’s a cultural border that keeps us from living apart.
I remember going to the Spanish restaurant as a kid. Dad had ordered some seafood dish and they started by bringing the lemon water for washing your hands. Neither my parents nor my sister or I knew what to do with it, and both my sister and dad tentatively stuck their spoon into it to see if it was soup. Which had the waiter run over frantically motioning a hand-washing gesture. It was quite funny, actually. Looking back, I don’t think this is any different to the Eastern German asking about cooking a watermelon.
We often talk about home as a location. Where’s your home? Where are you from? But you can still live in different worlds though you live geographically so close to one another.
When I think back to the moments, when I felt ‘home’ and at ease, these are the first things that come up.
Home is arriving at Heathrow Airport. I still get a sense of ‘home’ whenever I’m at Heathrow Airport. Over eight years of living in London and traveling in and out of mostly Heathrow. For the last 25 years, this is the longest I’ve ever lived in one location, so there is a lot more memory and familiarity of traveling out of Heathrow Airport, than say the airport in Austin where I am now.
Home is talking about Eurovision on a London rooftop. In one of my earlier years in London, when I was living in a flatshare in Pimlico, my flatmate threw a birthday party at our place. I remember sitting on the rooftop overlooking Big Ben and the London Eye and talking for HOURS to this then-stranger, a friend of my flatmate. We bonded over growing up watching the train wreck that is the Eurovision song contest. We talked for hours and became good friends over the years. A few years ago, Dan and I went back to England for his wedding.
Home is admiring the cherry tree at the Portland AirBnB after living in Saigon for six months. The grounding feeling of seeing trees and nature similar to the climate I grew up in.
Home is sitting in the hotel restaurant in Kiev after a rough week in Istanbul. Having a quiet moment with breakfast and coffee, reading about the Russian invasion in the border region in the New York Times that’s been printed on paper and stapled together. It felt so weird to read these words when I was in that very country. In a beautiful restaurant with classical music playing. And though there was conflict going on, I felt more at home there, in a more ‘Western’ culture than in Turkey, where my apartment was at the time.
Home is freaking out about the local Texas bakery having ‘Osterkranz’ for Easter - a traditional yeasty bread eaten for Easter brunch in Germany. Dan may have sent me the picture from the bakery to show me what freak offerings they had, but I recognized it and put in an order immediately.
None of these moments are connected to a single geography. Yet, it’s what feels home. Maybe home is a string of things that evoke a familiar feeling.
If you enjoyed reading this, check out my other posts within the Kimchi and Sauerkraut Chronicles series, where I write about growing up as a Korean German.
