Yesterday, I made my first British friend.
There are probably a good amount of my readers who will think this is no big deal. After all, I am living in London, going to a British school, and living with British students, so common logic dictates that I would have made dozens of friends with British accents and habits. Sadly, that's not the case.
I've come to the conclusion that London is a very introverted city. Having grown up in the suburbs, I have no way to know if this applies to all cities, and the fact may be amplified by the fact that I came to London on my own and have taken the time to notice the habits of strangers. London is known as a very literary and music-oriented place, but even people who forget to bring their newspapers or iPods to their respective buses and cafes would rather look at their shoes than at other people.
And I fit right in.
I am a naturally introverted person, who has taken long and arduous measures to become more outgoing. This process towards extroversion has been promoted by other outgoing people who don't make me feel like a complete freak for striking up a conversation with a stranger. Some Londoners? Don't mind making you feeling like a complete freak.
To be fair, there are gradations of Londoners. Many British students have no problem talking with you in class or in a queue for coffee, but they typically leave shortly after to join their already-made friends. Cliques have already formed, as it is second semester.
As a result, all of my friends have been affiliate students (Americans, Canadians and Australians are much more similar than Americans and the British...for some reason). This is great on a certain level, because they all want to travel and go out on weekends and understand being overwhelmed by a new environment. But all of my friends have agreed that they came to London to meet British people.
We've approached the problem in different ways, and one way that definitely does NOT work is to incorporate a single British person in a group of Americans and Australians. The Londoner quickly feels like they've entered a madhouse of giddy school children in awe of Big Bird. When the British person finally flees the scene, we all feel a little ashamed.
I hope by now, Reader, you fully understand the amazing implications of the statement, "I made a British friend today."
It began with a mistake. I showed up for my Jane Austen seminar as did one other person. Turns out the class had been cancelled and we were the only ones who had not checked our email that morning. So I took the risk of asking if she wanted to get a coffee. I say "risk" because typically when I've asked British students to do this, they claim previous plans with other friends or the obligation of a long paper due tomorrow. There's no way to tell if she said "yes" because she wanted to get coffee or because she realized any excuse would clearly be a lie; she had clearly planned on going to class for two hours and now had time to kill. Regardless, she was very friendly and lead me to a cafe I had not known about in the basement of a bookstore next to campus.
Most everyone has experienced the stressful situation of forced conversation in new company. Every moment contributes to the first impression you make on this stranger, and you do everything in your power to create a lighthearted and easy atmosphere without boring the other person or yourself. As a new kid on the block, I've had the exact same conversation with countless people about my major, hometown, family, and hobbies, so typically there's no immediate spark with new acquaintances. One of the most awkward generic conversations I'm used to is the subject of music. Usually people ask "What music do you listen to?" are fairly passionate about it. I love music, but I don't pay much attention to what's popular or cool, or even make an effort to remember names of bands (I have enough trouble remembering people's names). Naming genres is messy as well, because I like a lot of in-between music, the part-rock-part-folk-part-jazz or part-electronic-part-pop-part-rap kind of music. So in general I tend to avoid the subject until I know the person won't judge me for my non-committal attitude.
However, when my new acquaintance casually asked, "What music do you listen to?" I decided to take it as an opportunity to say something about my hometown, because the local music scene there is pretty fantastic. I was in the middle of describing one of my favorite bands from the area when she interrupted me to ask if I'd heard of Pokey Lafarge.
I was stunned. Because not only had I heard of Pokey Lafarge, but he belongs to a very devoted niche. I admitted to seeing them live on a metro, and earned the type of jealous respect that these exchanges bring. The mention of this one band opened up an entire new level in this budding friendship and we suddenly began making plans to go to music venues in town and check out all the random bands. It lead our coffee date into lunch with her childhood friend and shopping at her favorite store. By the end of the day we were friends of Facebook. We exchanged numbers. Official Friend Stuff.
I hope to blog soon about future adventures with my new British person at London music venues. Til then, I'll have to continue my new formula for making friends in London: Wait for your teacher to cancel class, and show up anyway.
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