Friend management

This is great, I’m finally getting in some new friendships. This is what I’ve been missing the past weeks. I do have a group from all the exchange students here, but that remains a group with very mixed interests. So it is hard to really connect to others there. And then there is a group from my class, that is way better already, we’re sharing this interest in cultures, communicating, etc.

But still there was a feeling that something missed. The Jong MenS group I’m in in the Netherlands (and all the people around that) is something I hadn’t found here yet. But luckily that has been changing the last days! In the student café, Origo, I saw some people, one giving a massage to another, they looked nice. And I managed to make some contact, which I found a bit hard. Mainly because the overal tendency here is not to say ‘hi’ to others you don’t know yet. The Swedes – overall – are a bit reserved. So that gives me a feeling that it is hard to connect. But among students this is less the case. And luckily it worked out. And afterwards I was sitting somewhere else and a few of that group came by and said ‘hej’. I felt very good then because it in some way really surprised me. People have been talking a lot about – and I’ve been experiencing it myself too – that when you meet someone and think you made a new friend in some way and you see each other at another time, people don’t even greet. It is a bit strange, so that was why I was surprised and happy to see these people, whom I’ve only been talking to for some fifteen minutes, already said hi :)

And this evening I’ve met up with some Indian students who are here for just two weeks. And it was great to notice that I soon had a good connection with them, maybe also because their English is so good, compared for example with the Turkisch people I had sometimes a lot of trouble just talking about normal things, because we didn’t had this common language. And there was a Swedish girl with her own company in spiritually healing people. Which was the second moment I could relate to someone else with things that are familiar to me too.

Now only comes the ‘friend management’. It is strange that when you meet so much new people in such a short time. It suddenly gets hard to keep track of all this. Where normaly you meet new friends not that often, so you can easily ‘manage’ the relations. But hey, if it is the worst thing that I’ve too many friends to manage ;) then that’s not bad.

Tags: friends, language, management, spirituality, swedes

Categories: an emotional journey