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PolskiThe problem with being foreign
I talked with my best friend on Skype yesterday. She lives in London and we don’t manage to speak very often due to the time differences. We hadn’t talked in a little bit, so she asked me how everything is going. I told her about me being a bit homesick lately and about how hard it is for us to find new friends and how much we miss our friends back in Germany.
Just to explain it to you a little bit as well: I find Los Angeles to be a little hard to connect with people. Flo and I are not the most open people (very german I guess) and are actually in a state of our lifes where partying and going out is not our number 1 goal. Due to those circumstances we don’t meet new people very often and can’t always connect to the ones we met, because they are either party animals or trying to network for career purposes. I told my best friend all about that and she said she has that exact same problem in London. I guess we both didn’t chose citys to live in where people actually lan to spend the rest of their lifes. Both LA and London attract a lot young people that are looking for new experiences and also for big careers.
One guy that Flo freelances for told us that he didn’t find friends at all in the three years he lived in LA. Don’t get me wrong: I love LA and I know it’s mostly our fault that we don’t meet new people a lot. But I feel like this city is not for everyone. And we are actually starting to question, if it might be time for us to move on. Maybe to Orange County or maybe a little further away. We will see what the future will bring. It is definitely still a very exciting journey.
Tags: career, friends, germany, LA, London, Los Angeles, Orange County, party
August 13th, 2012 at 9:07 am
What we experienced here in Miami is that you get to know new people all the time and when you think you are actually already good friends with somebody, they decide to move to another state or town and you never hear from them again. For people over here it seems to be normal to make friends with somebody for the time you live in this city and then move on to the next city and make new friends. My German brain has a hard time adjusting to that. I am still in contact with my “old” friends from Germany or Germans who live somewhere in the US. Maybe Americans are just more used to travel around (for college, new jobs, new house etc.), so they don’t “commit” into long-term friendships. Weird!
August 14th, 2012 at 4:16 pm
Try pages like meetup and Craigslist for activities you like to try, sport groups etc. This usually helps a lot to connect with “grounded” people who are not all about party or career. There is a certain group of people LA seems to brim with, we have come here from Berlin and struggled too with that and sometimes still do. For us it is now 2.5 years. But yes, Orange County helps by finding a different crowd, we live at the eastern border of L.A. county and it is already better in this area.