Great Things About Expat Life, Vol. 1: Unique Friendships

There are many wonderful things about living as an expat, and I thought I’d try to document some of them as an ongoing series here. Today’s topic - new friends.

In my experience, most of the time in life you become friends with people whom you share many things in common. That might be religious affiliation, or neighborhood proximity, or your grade in school. Much of the time (though not always), these people tend to look like us, think like us, and have many of the same life experiences.

One of the things that’s so awesome about living abroad is how much that gets turned on its head. Though you do still tend to make friends based on common interests and connections, the thing that you have in common is so different than before that you end up becoming friends with people you likely would never have been friends with in your previous stage of life.

If I survey the friends we’ve made in Valencia, I count families from Mexico, Canada, Australia, Spain, and Argentina, among others. Even the friends we’ve made who share our American heritage are not people we’d have likely crossed paths with in the States. One family is musicians (we were never cool enough to have musician friends in the US) and the other family is Mormon. As we are Jewish, it’s likely neither of us has ever had the opportunity to be friends with someone of the other’s faith.

The link we share with other expats is as unique as it is strong - each of us chose for one reason or another to leave our previous lives and start fresh in a new country. No matter how long we’ve been here, we each are either going through the same experience of trying to make heads or tails of a new culture, or we remember what it was like when we first arrived and are often happy to help.

We do want to make more friends from the Spanish community, but that will likely take more patience and time.

Until then, getting to know people with so many different backgrounds and perspectives is definitely one of the best things about expat life!