How to make friends and get a social life   (0 Comments)

I had always wanted to do my Year Abroad the hard way - I wanted Austian flatmates and Austrian friends for a new Austrian me. I rejected ERASMUS, pooh-poohed living in halls and neglected to tell my fellow Durham students also moving to Vienna that I was going to be there too. If a foreigner told me they were moving to London with no flat or bank account or university place or friends I’d think they were at least a little mad but I arrived in Austria’s capital equally unprepared. Maybe it’s because I am a little mad. Or maybe it’s because I didn’t really believe that the hard way would be hard. Everyone had told me my Year Abroad was going to be The Best Year Of My Life.

It turns out The Best Year Of My Life isn’t one long fit of euphoria. It turns out that it’s hard, ricidulously hard, at the beginning but it gets better and better. It turns out that it’s full of moments that make you want to call your mum but also moments that make you realise that you love the strange foreign country in which you’ve ended up.

After fourteen days of frantic email-checking, three visits to Bank Austria, six tours of potential flats and one terrifying ‘housemate casting party’ I thought I was sorted. However, as everyone is aware, it’s the people that make a place and, as I was very aware after two weeks in Austria, I had two friends in the entire country. I’d met them in London and they’d done the ‘if you ever come to Vienna’ thing… well I had, so I sent them a carefully worded email and stayed with their dad for a fortnight but it had come to my attention that one of the twins was always busy (or hated me and said she was busy) and one was a psycho.

I missed everything I’d found stifling in my two years at home. I wanted a corridor and college and classes with the same faces in them but all I had at the Universität Wien was lectures in which everyone sat silently and looked busy (sending a text message, writing the date neatly, staring at the professor so they wouldn’t miss a thing when she started to speak) until the lecture began. Well, not everyone sat silently. I was desperate for friends.

‘Hi! Ich bin Sophie. Wer bist du?’ There was a pause.

‘Warum?’. Why? Fantastic. I explained that I thought it was silly that nobody was talking to the person next to them. Didn’t this girl realise that everyone in the room was united by love for the history of German literature?

‘Oh. Ich bin Susi.’ Another pause. I seemed to be sitting next to the only person in the room who didn’t understand the rudiments of conversation. I tried again, asking if socially inept Susi was from Vienna.

‘Nein, Stuttgart’. I had asked a German if she was Austrian. From what I had learnt about Austro-German relations I suspected this wouldn’t go down well and sure enough our conversation drew to a depressing halt. Making friends was harder than I had thought.

Fast forward to attempt two. I was looking for a different conversation starter, a more organic way of getting going. The girl next to me wasn’t giving me any inspiration. Except… she’d written ‘Amy’ in small letters on her box of skittles.

‘Is that so no-one will steal them?’ It was obviously a joke. It wouldn’t win any comedy awards but it was said with a smile, a smile which I hoped would be returned.

‘Nein’. Right. There was a pause. They were becoming a large feature of my conversations with my peers.

‘So… why did you write your name on your skittles?’ Oh GOD did I actually just say that? I’m not actually that boring or annoying, am I? Amy Skittles quickly came to the conclusion that I was and our conversation ended there. Whatever, I didn’t want to be friends with a compulsive possession-labeler anyway.

Next lecture I was next to some girls (they’re all girls, I do study German after all) who were actually talking to each other, but in an impenetrable Austrian dialect. It didn’t look like I was going to have much luck here either. And then the worst lecture I have ever had began. I started swinging my legs in boredom and accidentally kicked the girl in front of me. As I apologised she turned around with a friendly don’t-worry-about-it smile. Yes, a friendly smile. I needed something really witty to say to her at the end of the lecture.

After one of the longest ninety minute periods of my life Friendly Girl started packing her rucksack. She was taking ages and I felt like an idiot obviously waiting but just when I was about to give up she was done and I slipped in beside her in the queue for the door.

‘Wow, he talks so much but he says so little’. This is what I had come up with after 90 minutes. There’s a reason it’s not in the Little Book of Chat-Up Lines but it did the job. Friendly Girl laughed. Yes, I had been funny in German. And then we had a conversation. It, amazingly, lasted more than a couple of seconds and we covered that Friendly Girl was Lisa and had lived in Dublin last year.

Me: So what are you doing now?

Lisa: I was going to get a coffee and do some reading before my next lecture.

Oh. I had been planning to go for it and ask out my new almost-friend but it looked like it would have to wait.

Lisa: You can come if you want. I know it’s hard when you move somewhere and you don’t know anybody.

Me (in my head): YES!!!

I now see Lisa as half friend, half gateway. First there was coffee, and then coffee every week and then a Halloween party. And then there was not just Lisa, but Elisa and then Lilian and even Nikolaus and then there was another party and another and by New Year we were on Schnapps with Lisa’s grandmother in the countryside and skiing with Lilian and Nikolaus. I was really glad I waited for Lisa to put her books in her rucksack that Tuesday. Gradually I realised the hard way wasn’t so hard any more and who knows, maybe I’ll look back on my Year Abroad as The Best Year Of My Life.

Author: Sophie Burt

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