Seven weeks is a long time to spend somewhere. It’s not a vacation, and anyway I wasn’t vacationing in London. I was there to work.

Specifically, I was there to teach in the Boston University College of General Studies summer semester, which takes place in London and is one of the most adventurous teaching experiences I’ve had. We don’t just teach in the classroom — London becomes our classroom, and we go everywhere. The British Museum, the Victoria and Albert, the Imperial War Museum, Kew Gardens, Brighton . . .

And my daughter was with me, taking classes on reading Egyptian hieroglyphs. Last summer, when I taught in London, I was mostly by myself, and in that situation I can lead a fairly monastic existence. I suppose the female equivalent of monastic is conventual — when I looked up the female equivalent of a monastery, I was given the word convent, and told that historically a convent was actually a house of friars, now knows as a friary. The point of this etymological rabbit hole is that when I’m by myself, I can live on oatmeal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and soup for dinner, day after day. I don’t need entertainment, other than some books (all right, an increasing quantity of books). And I mostly focus on work. But that’s not enough for a teenager.

So anyway, I was working and living in London for seven weeks, with a teenager. I had to make a home somehow, even in a short-term rental flat.

There is a sort of art to making a home. How do you make a space both functional and cozy? Particularly when you’ll only be there a short time, and you’ll need to leave it as clean and spare as you found it. What are the components of home? I suppose they’re different for everyone, and what you need depends on the place you’re living in. Ours was furnished and outfitted with the basic necessities. But we did find ourselves buying things that would make our lives there more comfortable.

Since I had taught in London the summer before, and we are given some storage space, I had a few items waiting for me: a yoga mat, two blankets, office supplies. I don’t know if office supplies make you feel at home, but they have that effect on me. When I have my scissors and stapler and hole puncher, I just feel much more comfortable, as though I’m in a known and familiar world. And having a yoga mat means stability. It means that on this spinning globe of ours, I have a place to stand on, and a routine for my mornings. It’s like a little bit of my own ground in the larger country of Albion — not quite a garden, but a rectangle of concentration in a strange landscape.

Because London is, indeed, a strange landscape — stranger than Budapest, not only because Budapest is also my home, but because when you travel from the United States to Budapest, you expect Budapest to be different. Whereas if you travel to London, you expect it to be somehow the same — at any rate, you expect people to be speaking English, but there is no such thing as English. There are only Englishes, many of them, with different dialects and accents. Even within London, many Englishes are spoken, and some of them were quite difficult for me to understand, so I was conscious, always, of being in a foreign country, with its own customs that are not those of Boston.

There are of course the obvious differences, people driving on the other side of the street and the car, so that I was always trying to get in the wrong side, and always in danger of being run over. The food is different, the water from the tap tastes different, even the air is different, both from the soft air of Budapest and the sharp air of Boston. The air of London hangs around you like a curtain, often of chilly rain, sometimes of a damp warmth that is different from the dry, bright warmth of Budapest.

In this strange place, how did we make a home? Partly it was by buying stuff, the basic stuff you need for everyday life. Placemats and napkins with daisies embroidered on them. Cheerful bowls and mugs for our breakfast and tea. I made a rule: what we bought had to either be good enough that we would bring it back to Budapest with us, or cheap enough that we could bring it to a nearby charity shop afterward, and donate it so others could potentially use it. Thinking that we could pass it on to others made the purchases seem less extravagant, although we did not buy anything expensive — our primary source of items to pass on was Flying Tiger, and the things we wanted to keep, we found in Marks and Spencer. My favorite purchases were three mugs with animals on them: an owl, a rabbit, and a badger. There is a fourth mug, with a fox on it, but the only one available in the store on High Street Kensington had a chipped rim, and although I went back several times, no fox mugs were added to the inventory. Next summer, I’m going back to London to see if there is a fox mug. (I mean, I’m going back to teach. But the fox mug is an added incentive.)

We also bought a lot of books, too many of course. So many that we had a buy an extra backpack to bring them back to Budapest, and I thought we would be charged for it, but the ticket agent who checked us in said no worries, it’s small enough that I don’t charge you. And he told me about his daughter was also a teacher, but is now a school principal. I think books are like bricks that you use to build the walls of home, and actually in Boston and Budapest, all my rooms are lined with bookshelves. Being surrounded by books is like being surrounded by friends — I know that at any point, I can go have a conversation with Jane Eyre or Ozma of Oz.

So I suppose we build our homes out of little things. Books and mugs and blankets. In Budapest and Boston, I have furniture that I picked out, and rugs underfoot, but the things that make a home are smaller. They’re the pens in the wire mesh cup. The paper flowers in the vases. The pillows scattered around. The things that make life softer and more interesting.

When our time in London was done, we packed up almost everything, gave away what we needed to, and left the keys on the table. We had made a home for a little while, and even for that little while, it was worth it to have bought the mugs with the owl and rabbit and badger (which anyway are now with us in Budapest). I’ll be back for the fox.

This is part of the Boston University London campus near Kensington.

And these were some cakes we bought in a cafe that looked delicious but proved disappointing. We were not in Budapest anymore . . . (I may be biased, but I think Budapest has the best cakes in the world.)

Living in Chelsea . . .