5.

Cross-cultural friendships teach us that everyone has a different way of coping with similar
challenges they are facing. Friends can impart useful advice, based on their personal
experience of loneliness as an expat. Even a small gesture like inviting you to a trendy book
store opening can improve a dragging Sunday afternoon.
● A Cultural Adventure: Food and Traditions
Making friends with like-minded expats often leads to a sharing of their culture with you.
These friendships can allow you to discover new cultural practices — exotic food and
completely unheard-of traditions. Instead of a classic Halloween party, a friend may insist on
showing you their favorite Mexican holiday: Día de Muertos. You may soon find yourself with
a different event to go to each week — be it a religious holiday like Diwali or the historically
significant Day of German Unity — which is never a bad thing.
You might be invited to a dinner party devoted to a culture and its ethnic cuisine, where you
can taste brand-new dishes and maybe even pick up a few tips for yourself. Trying your
hand at making your own Moroccan lamb tagine to bring along to a North African dinner
would no doubt be appreciated by your host. Perhaps try your Turkish friend’s practice of
boiling ground coffee beans rather than your standard shop-bought soy latte — it might just
become your new morning staple.

● Discovering the World through Friendship

By connecting with your friends’ cultures and experiences, you see the world through
different lenses. Having a French best friend, for example, would show you the importance
of long and relaxed family meals in French culture. What may seem strange to you could be
just daily life to others!
Particularly in expat circles, everyone has a different story; what brought them to where they
are right now. Sharing yours and listening to others’ can bring friends from other cultures
closer together. Imagine yourself, for instance, in your new friend’s shoes and think how you
might have coped with leaving the comfort of your home for the first time ever.

● Endless Travel Options

Expats are no strangers to traveling around the world and don’t need an excuse to do so.
Nevertheless, if you’re planning a vacation with friends or a reunion with someone from a
previous expat adventure, having friends across borders can give you the perfect opportunity
to travel to places you might not visit on your own. A quick trip to swim with stingrays in the
Cayman Islands doesn’t seem so far-fetched when you know someone living there.
Aside from reconnecting you with old friends, your global network can help you cross a few
destinations off your travel bucket list. While visiting your friends, you might also receive an
exclusive guided tour around their hometown, and they may let you into some secrets only a
local would know, like where to find the best pizza slice in NYC.

● A Step Closer to Becoming Multilingual

Having cross-cultural friendships will provide you with a group of people who are able to
speak a wealth of languages. If you have always wanted to learn Spanish and a fellow expat
just happens to be a native speaker, you’re in luck! You need not enroll in a language course
or pay money for a private tutor — simply pick up a few words or key phrases from listening
to your friends talking.
It could also be worth arranging a tandem partnership with one of your friends from another
culture and exchanging your language skills. The best part of having cross-cultural
friendships is the chance to learn and discover more every day.

6. Valuable
There are some expectations for friendship in some countries. Expectations for personal
relationships differ across cultures. Especially in America, Americans value close
friendships, but they also value privacy and independence. It is different from indonesian,
most of us are depending on each other. For an American, to have privacy or to give
someone privacy is a positif meaning. But, the word `privacy` when we translate it to other
cultures, It's more likely to have negative meaning.
For example, in this case. In any true friendship, whatever the culture may be, a person is
expected to show interest and concern in a friend`s serious problems. It is not possible to
generalize about americans because there are so many varieties of Americans, but it is
possible to say that many foreigners or newcomers from different cultures have felt
disappointed by Americans. If someone from another culture is having a serious problem,
Americans may say, “let me know if there`s something I can do to help.” If the Americans do
not receive a specific request, they may feel that there`s nothing they can do. It is very
different from our culture, if we see a friend in trouble or having a serious problem we will
give “sympathy calls” or give frequent visits.
It is important to realize that if an American acts differently from what you expect in a
personal relationship, do not assume that the friendship is over or that the person is not a
true friend, they only have a different way to express their sympathy and their friendship.