Making Friends in Germany

Making friends in Germany, well anytime you move anywhere is never easy, especially when there are language barriers.  Today, I found myself having lunch with five other students from my Intensive German Language Course, quite by chance.  Someone mentioned they were hungry and off we went.  We were a rather electic group representing Japan, Mongolia, Mexico, Thailand and myself from Canada.  We range in age from 17 to 50-something and from professions as diverse as a recent high school graduate, to a piano teacher to a former program director.

But despite our differences, the conversation soon turned to familiar territory, that which I could have been discussing with my closest friends in Canada - that being the topic of men naturally, but with a cultural spin of course.  Thai and Mexican men were quickly dismissed as womanizers not to be trusted, while we didn't get much information about Mongolian men since the 17 year old Mongolian representative had not yet had a boyfriend.  I naturally supported German men while the Thai representative countered that German men were notoriously difficult.  After some debate we came to the conclusion that German men were good for strong women , but not for soft spoken women who were too afraid to speak their mind.  I am of course aware that my new friends and I were grossly overgeneralizing but overgeneralizing or not, I thoroughly enjoyed myself and the familar territory that I found myself on.

When I finally left after gabbing and laughing for two hours, I left in awe of how easy and free our conversation was despite spanning five different countries, languages and cultures.   I had a ton of things to do this afternoon but making friends in Germany was more important than anything else I had to do.  We've decided to make it a weekly ritual and will be meeting for lunch after class next Thursday.  Perhaps making friends in Germany will be easier than I thought.