Mission Brit.

For a city attracting millions each year, I sure seem to bear witness to a lot of the 'departures' sign board. In the past week alone, I've sent off two of my London based Kiwi friends, heading home to the blue sky and vitamin D of New Zealand, which leaves me with a depleting friend pile. My tank is beginning to look awfully low. With one friend currently thousands of feet in the air (ironically, with seriously limited feet space) and one avidly packing up his life, the time has come to focus on finding friends outside the Marmite coated, Pineapple Lump laden, Whittakers bubble I've been living in. Dare I say, it may be time for, gasp, British friends. Three months on and I can't help but force myself to realise this may be the very necessary next step of truly living in England. Moving to London is one thing, it takes planning, preparation and undoubtedly a fragment of crazy, but making friends here? It's like jumping head first into the Thames and thinking you won't contract more diseases than the house of UK's Celebrity Big Brother.

Working all hours of daylight (plus the rest), rising at dawn in a weary slumber and forcing your eyes wide open when you get to the office, only to have them stubbornly close on departure means little time is left in each day. Weekends are only two days (I know, rude right?) which means between catching up sleep, and catching up on the latest episode of Downton leaves little time for leaving the house, let alone socialising. Luckily, the cheap transport provides a whole-hearted incentive to get out and roam around the city meeting friends (riiiiiight, are you listening Boris?) But to be bashful of expense in London is like complaining of outward displays of romance in Paris; while fun, still entirely pointless (despite letters of complain, Francois still hasn't responded.) If I wanted to live in a city I could happily afford, well, Christchurch is still there. As is Asia, but that's another can of unidentified animal.

The irony of moving to the other side of the world is that other people are also doing it (shockingly yes, even New Zealander's make their way over from the tiny dollops hanging off the globe's underside) and in this age of trains, planes and other transport allowing ease and speed of changing continents, it also means that you are likely to meet someone from your home town while in a land that doesn't speak your language nor look like anything resembling home. This stands especially true from my experience. Upon moving to Paris, I made five new Kiwi friends. This may not seem impressive bar the fact in total my 'new friend count' reached six. Okay, that's not entirely true, I was lucky to meet a wonderful contingent of people from all over the world, but there is no denying that my largest pool of new friends had a predominate nationality as home to all things All Black. I moved to France and lived Kiwi. But nor is this uncommon. 

My initial shift to London saw me move in with a French family I meet through a contact I made in Paris. I was quickly aware how French their British lifestyle was. Sure there was a lack (though not an absence) of baguettes and fine cheese in their lives, but they lived in a predominately French speaking area of London (dubbed the corner of French infestation) and their friends were mostly French. This isn't overly surprising given the close proximity of the two countries, but they told me the same thing happened when they lived in Australia. Australia. That place that all Europeans think is miles away as it involves being on a plane longer than their 'How I Meet Your Mother' episode and involves crossing more than one ocean. Many of their French friends in Paris were introduced to them while in the land Down Under. (This really set my head spinning. Images flooded in of scrawny men with perfectly coiffed hair in barely their board shorts and cigarette toting women clad in heels and tailored dresses on a scorching hot beach, the unpredictable sea lapping dangerously close to their prepared picnics and Hermes display towels.)

So it wasn't a Kiwi phenomenon as I'd previously, naively, thought.  It wasn't a show of New Zealand residents and their inability to acclimatize to new locations and people, something I imagined was to happen as a result of our 'secluded' upbringing. (Or so people seem to think. While conversing with an American once on the comparison of the amount of 'friends' on Facebook, I was told Kiwi's must often run out of people to become friends with. After family, friends from the farm, the milkman, postman and techno-savvy sheep, there must be no one left; or so it was suggested. I prefer to think we're just not 'friend sluts' to the same extent.) But we were both wrong; discovering new friends from your own nation while miles from home was a culturally inclusive, international piggy backing notion and quantities of Facebook friends was irrelevant to chosen child rearing location. I was learning things and I was right. I could get used to this. 

So despite the sadness of waving goodbye to friends heading on a 27 plus hour journey home, it forced me to admit that making the most of an international experience may involve initiating social predicaments with people who had never head of Dan Carter, didn't crave Vogels and were unaware of the meaning of 'nek minut'. People who didn't end every phrase with 'ay' and pepper their sentences with 'like', 'heaps' and 'reckon'.

So began the mission to find a Brit friend. A cockney talking, allergic to the sun, dentist-phobic Pom. Armed with complimentary stereotypes, I was bound to find a British companion.