The nature of friendships abroad

In the space of a month, I’ve said goodbye to three dear friends who were moving elsewhere. First, a few weeks ago, my closest friend in Sydney moved back to NY with her husband and two children. Our families became incredibly close friends the moment we met, and loved spending weekends traveling and exploring together. Last weekend another dear friend and her family left Sydney to live in New Zealand for five weeks and, upon their return, have just a few months left in Oz before returning to the States. And, three nights ago, I said goodbye to another wonderful family, of Spanish and English background, that moved across the country to another Australian city. This family lived in the apartment building next door to us and Syd and their three-year-old daughter played together many nights at our neighborhood playground. Explaining their sudden absence to Syd has been challenging.

The common denominator for all of us is that we are (or were) expats living abroad in Australia. We are fortunate to live in Pyrmont, a lovely neighborhood of Sydney that is chock full of expats from all over the world. In addition to Australian, our friends and neighbors are an incredible mix of nationalities: Spanish, Mexican, Irish, Korean, Japanese, Brazilian, French, Korean, Hungarian – the list goes on and on. Every expat has a fascinating story of where they came from and how they ended up in Australia.

One of the privileges of being an expat is sampling the tastes, sounds, and experiences of a foreign land. And one of the downsides of being an expat is that, for many of us, it’s for a finite period. You would think, due to the transitory nature of many expats’ time abroad, that the friendships you form are superficial. I’ve found, however, that the opposite is true: while you may only make a few good friends while living abroad, the friendships that you foster are deep and meaningful. I credit the genuineness of these friendships to the fact that you know from the outset that you only have a short time together, before one or the other families skips town. There’s no pussyfooting around – gone are the days of having dinner with a family one week and not seeing them again for a month or two - if you like someone, you seem them, a lot! We have found so many kindred souls here that also took the plunge of moving across the world to live in this wonderful country. The shared sense of adventure unites all of us in a way that I could not have anticipated.

We are half way through our year in Australia and I can already picture that time when we too will be packing up our things and leaving (where we’ll go next is still to be determined). I know that after living here for a year that we will only have scratched the surface of this incredible part of the world. Perhaps we’ll be lucky enough to visit again someday. In the meantime, I look forward to staying in touch with the friends I made in Australia, friendships that I anticipate will last long after our time here.