Last post was about how I ended up in Germany in the first place. Now I'll tell you about my cool new job. The atmosphere of the new job couldn't have been more different from my old one. The majority of my department was made up of guys my age. Huge difference from before where the average age was 55. I was super juiced! Not only would I be learning new skills to make my resume bright and shiny, but I actually had the possibility of having fun with my coworkers! Not that older men are not fun, but they aren't exactly the people to call for a pub crawl on Friday night. They tend to be married and more interested in happy hour. They have wives and children to go home to. Guys my age would be down for the pub crawl! (Or so I thought...) I soon found out that:
1. Not many of my new colleagues spoke English. (Most of them were German.)
2. They tended to have wives or girlfriends and young children. (Not interested in happy hour or pub crawls.)
3. I am a girl. A single girl. Single girls do not get invited by with non-single guys.
4. I was going to spend many evenings and weekends alone, playing Canasta on Yahoo.
Add to all of that a minimum 6-hour time difference and you get my situation. It took a long time for me to make friends. My colleagues were polite, but not friendly. We had polite office chat with coffee. They were all too concerned about speaking proper English to really speak to me. :( Engineers tend not to be the most socially adept group. Add to that gender, language and culture differences, and you've got one lonely American girl.
Enter the Multi-Culti English-speaking group. A multicultural group of brave people in my department who were either not German or German and interested in improving their English. I found ways to insert myself into their lunch outings by offering to help them better their English. Additionally, I was the local US expert and the recent election was great conversation fodder. I was in! New friendships were just waiting to be made!
Have you ever found yourself in a new situation needing to find a way to make friends? How did you accomplish that?
Teaching your co-workers to speak English is a good start in cultivating friendship. In that way, you can have a common ground for your conversations. From there, things will take care of themselves, and before you know it, you have found your new best friends in them.
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