#2: Join a club
This tip is actually my #1 tip, but without patience any other tip from anybody is totally useless! So please bare with me 🙂
Ok, so you have just picked up all your stuff and moved to another country. What now?
What would you like to do, if you could do ANYTHING?!
Ok, so is there a club for that? There are literally clubs for everything, and if you can’t find it, try to look for something similar instead.
When I first moved to San Diego, California, back in 2012 to have my internship there, I looked at my old list from the teenage years, where I had noted down 10 must-do-before-I-die things, where Fencing was one of them.
Since Denmark is not a big fencing nation I took the opportunity of my travels to join a new sport and try my luck as a modern musketeer at Cabrillo Academy of Swords. And this was probably the single best thing I did for myself in all the time, I was in U.S.A.
Not only did I learn some new skills with the sword, but I met some of the nicest people in California, with whom I spend quite a lot of my spare time. The clue here is not to pick something you are already good at specifically, but pick some kind of activity where you are bound to meet other people and something you are keen on doing for a long time.
Again patience is the key! If you are not ready to commit and maybe spend some extra time to get to know the other people in the club, they won’t connect with you.
You have to sacrifice some of you to receive something from others.
You cannot keep everything as it is if you want something else…
and
It’s more about the other person, than it is about you!
Try to ask the others about their life without comparing all the time. For some this is easier than for others, but we all like when people take interest in who we are and how we are doing.
When I moved to Aarhus after my studies I was very lucky to already have some friends from my hometown who had moved to Aarhus some years before, so I didn’t have to start from scratch. But as some people moved away because they found their dream job, and others got engaged with raising their children while I was still just me, I started to feel lonely in the middle of the city.
So I tried a new club activity (since my knee couldn’t take fencing anymore) in the other end of town: Archery!
While the sport itself was darn great, and I could easily see myself practicing it for many years to come, the social aspect in the shooting range was not the same. Everyone practiced for him-/herself just in the same room, so after 2 months I quit again. So you really need to think about what club you join and what it is you want to get out of it. For me it is 50/50 skills and social relationships.