friendship with foreigners

Studying and living abroad is amazing in many ways; you meet people from all over the world, you face challenges that you never could imagine, you learn how to conquer most of them, and you alway come out stronger than you were before. And while at first making friends with people from cultures far different from your own can be tough, it's so extremely rewarding once you do, and after a while you stop seeing the differences and start seeing the similarities. They become you're very good friends but their nationality is never an issue or something that you even think about. The only time when it's brought up is when you share your memories from home, or teach your friends about your country, and is there really a better way of learing about other countries than to experience it first hand through your closest friends?

The downside of it all is that eventually it all inevitably comes to an end. People go back to their countries, or they move on to a different one. In England, I was one of the people who stayed for a while, but then I became one of those who moved back, something I wouldn't have thought possible even just a few months before I actually moved.

And although when I was abroad I missed the friends at home, people that I can now see every week, I now have to miss a ton of people spread out around the world, knowing that I may never see them again. When I was living abroad, I always knew that my friends in Sweden would still be there when I came home to visit, and they would be there if I ever decided to move back home. But the friends living abroad, some as far away as Australia, Indonesia, America, others still in Europe and not that far away, how can I know that I'll see them again? I'm sure I'll go to visit some of them, but how often will I go to Indonesia? And how often will a person from Indonesia go to Sweden?

It really makes me sad to think about people that I shared my life with for a pretty long time, good times and bad, knowing that they're so far away now, and that we'll never ever have what we had again. It used to be the people that I met in America that I missed, I would compare everything to my time there. But I was there for such a short period of time that I can't honestly say that I knew them all that well. Some more than others, sure, but it's the Bournemouth people that I miss the most now. I spent a year with most of them, even longer with some. In such a long period of time you manage to establish a solid friendship that won't just fade away with time, like it did with most people I met in Arizona. I never shared the mundane everyday life with my friends in Arizona, I only experienced the grandeur of partying and traveling. In Bournemouth it went so far beyond that. Yes we partied together, but we also stayed in watching movies together, had dinner at each other's places and cried in each others arms.

In the end, that brings people so much closer together than the greatest party of all.