You got an expat friend in me.

Hey look! Isn't someone who lies in front of steam trains exactly the kind of person you want to be friends with? No? Really?? Oh, well can we be friends anyway if I promise not to do that too often?

Ages ago I started a post about expat friendships. They are funny things you see. I started off by saying:

It would be a ginormous overstatement to say "I'm in love!", but you know that feeling of excitement you get when you think of the person that you've just met where you get butterflies in your stomach and you can't help but exclaim in your head "Woo hoo!!!!!!!!!!!"? Well, I feel a little like that. But, before you get ahead of me, I haven't traded Stevie in for one of those extra-tall Germans who have to bend in half to get on the U-Bahn, alas, no (though I dream of having one of those who understands what it says in all these letters I have to open and can gracefully steer me away from mistakenly ordering pig trotter stew with innard salad without having to carry round a German-English dictionary).

No, I have found a new friend. Or rather, as is the normal way of things in Fiona/Stevie world: Stevie found me a new friend in the swing park. I don't normally mention my friends in my blog; I'm not sure they are the types of people who like being flashed around the internet willy-nilly, and well, it seems a little unfair to write about them somehow. But I felt compelled to write about my new friend. I've been thinking a bit about friendship in foreign lands. Especially after another friend (also an expat) and I were talking about it.

The thing is, I have realised that friendship as an expat can be quite a different thing. For starters there's the language barrier. If like me, your foreign language skills are somewhat limited, it can be pretty difficult to develop friendships with native speakers. Once you've told them that they're not allowed to mount an aerial on their roof and asked after their mother's constipation and the failing brakes on her car, well, there's not much else to talk about. Especially if they're not willing to play out the part of the other person who is looking for a light for their cigarette as they hitchhike their way to Erfurt. So if you strike all the native speakers off your list, you're left with the people who speak your own language. And that can be a relatively small pond to fish from.

I know I am still lucky. I live in the capital city which frankly is awash with foreigners, and not only that, I speak English which is great. Admittedly, I wouldn't say no to speaking Turkish and Russian as well, but that's just not going to happen anytime soon

- and that's as far as I got with this post. I got distracted by nights out and parties and friendship-bracelet making sessions, etc, etc, and I forgot all about it. But allow me to continue. The thing I was going to say about expat friendships is that you have a smaller 'pond' of people from which to choose your friends and that is not always a bad thing. I have made friends with people who 'back home' I would probably not have given a chance to and therefore would have missed out on the different things that they can bring to a friendship. I've made friends with some very different, but very interesting people, so if there's one thing to take out of this foreign experience it's that I will hopefully be more open to making friends from all walks of life and not necessarily just go for people who on the surface seem 'my type'. Don't get me wrong, there have still been people who we have met and gone out with and thought afterwards that we just didn't like enough to want to hang out with- that's just life. But what I think we all hope for, is that we meet someone who shares our ideals, our sense of humour, or likes and dislikes, our cultural history perhaps: someone in other words who might just be a perfect friend.

It's easy to make friends in the same situation as yourself. All us expats thrown in together soon find each other and it's a bit like when you join a baby group when you have your first child, you meet a whole bunch of other people in exactly the same position and find you have tons to talk about, moan about, understanding shoulders to cry on, new experiences to bumble through together and laugh about, and it's all good. But sometimes somewhere along the line when the kids are out of nappies, and you've got more settled into your expat life, you realise that maybe you don't have as much in common with some of these people as you have thought and a few fall away from the group and move on, and that's fine. Chances are you will have met a few people who will be lifelong friends.

The downside of expat friendships is that people do move on, literally. Most English speakers I meet in Berlin are here for a couple of years, usually 5 at most. I meet very few people who are 'here for good'. Unless they have married a German that is. Some people struggle with the temporary nature of these friendships. But, it's not so bad. With Facebook and the internet in general, blogs included, it is much easier to keep in touch with people wherever they are in the world.

More recently though I discovered that some expats can be a bit brutal in their networking for friendships. I came to realise that someone who I thought was a good friend was actually not that interested in being 'my' friend but just wanted to use me in order to meet my other friends. Another friend told me this is not uncommon, and she has often found that newcomers attempt to make friends through her, though they may not be interested in her as a friend. She seemed to take this as just par for the course, but it all seems a bit callous to me. She suggested to me that my bad experience might have come about because the person knew that I was due to leave Berlin at the end of May. She says that she knows a few expats whose first question on meeting new people is "How long are you here for?", and if it doesn't meet some acceptable length of time in their head, then they don't bother any further with that person. I kind of get it, but I can't help but think that they might be missing out on meeting some potential good friends, and having some good times. Or maybe, just maybe, the other person has just had a lucky escape.

It seems that this is quite a common trait amongst expats. People feel that it's not worth their while investing in temporary friendships, and get bored repeating their story to a seemingly endless queue of transient friends. I read a post on another blog where the author talks of the superficial nature of expat friends, and discusses how expats often put other expat friendships on 'PAUSE' as soon as friends from home come to visit or someone more interesting comes along. But isn't that always the case. For someone like me who has always lived my adult life away from 'home' having friends or family to visit was never usually a case of a quick half hour out of my day and more often a weekend or a few days, and so because I saw them less often it seemed more important to spend all my time with these people even if that meant putting local friendships and plans on hold. So I am not sure that I entirely agree with that being an aspect of the transience or superficiality of these friendships.

Anyway, I think it's an interesting topic. What's been your experience of expat friendships? I'd love to hear all about it.