Chapter 54: To belong in I-House

This week that I spent in Edmonton, I slept on Frida’s floor in her tiny room on the fourth floor of International House, 111 Street. I cooked my meals in the shared kitchen and spent my evenings drinking tea and talking or watching a movie in the lounge with some of the other inhabitants of the fourth floor.

Already on the first night, when I arrived from the airport, jet-lagged and exhausted, I was met in the kitchen with welcoming smiles and offered herbal tea that would help me sleep. And that’s how my stay continued.

Half of the time, I didn’t need to cook, because someone else asked me to try their food. I’ve eaten Korean curry and had an amazingly generous french dinner with crepes and salad. We had to decline an invitation to a Mexican dinner, because we had already planned to eat sushi at a restaurant, and on Sunday evening, there was an all-I-House potluck, a kind of world tour through food where the lounge on every floor represented one region of the world. All the participants brought something typical from their home country and left it in the right lounge. Then we were divided into groups and were sent to one floor each, to spend fifteen minutes enjoying the cuisine of, say, East Asia, and when we were done, we continued on to the next floor.

The three Swedish I-House inhabitants and me had baked Swedish pastries, both ordinary cinnamon buns (kanelbullar) and a kind of sweet roll with whipped cream and almond paste (semlor) that to my knowledge isn’t baked anywhere else in the world, not atleast with these exact ingredients. We had spent all afternoon baking and there was quite a lot of buns – but when we finally arrived at the European floor (our last), there was no semlor and only four kanelbullar left. I was a bit disappointed, seeing as semlor is my one favourite pastry in the world, but mostly we were just happy to have managed to bake something Swedish that was at least as appreciated as all the French and Indian and Korean delicacies that were served at this most extraordinary potluck.

There is a kind of openness and understanding among the residents of I-House that I found really special. You could always find someone to talk to and already after just a few days, I felt as if I had become friends with most of the people that used to spend time in the kitchen.

This friendliness to strangers is probably due to the fact that most of the I-House inhabitants are exchange students. They are all strangers in a new country and in a way, their corridor and their shared kitchen makes up their new, temporary families. There was a lot of talk going on, gossip and misunderstandings, but all in a very small-scale, familiar kind of way. It felt like their way of creating a feeling of home and belonging among themselves, fast, in order to feel safe in this new environment. But I’m not saying that this familiarity was in any way fake or insincere. No, quite the opposite. These people, Kate and Marianne and Karin and Marit and all the others, are among the warmest people that I’ve met.

It’s a special place, I-House at U of A. After only a week, I already feel that I belong and am quite sad to leave. I could easily stay for another week, sleep on Frida’s floor and hang out in the kitchen in the evenings. But that’s just the thing: Belonging is created among people, in a specific context, and now that I’ve experienced that I could find it so quickly here, maybe I can carry that feeling with me during the rest of my Noth America journey. Frida has found really great friends to surround herself with here in Edmonton, and I totally undrstand her occationall pangs of melancholy now that her last days here are approaching. I almost feel the same.