What extra-curricular interests do you have? • Consider visiting a church. • Go to an open language exchange group. • Look on CouchSurfing, and meet someone

What extra-curricular interests do you have? • Consider visiting a church. • Go to an open language exchange group. • Look on CouchSurfing, and meet someone for coffee. Those are usually free of charge, and will put you in contact with mostly respectable people. I'm a TCK, and I'm a foreigner everywhere. I'm now in rural India, and I started a conversation in a supermarket checkout queue with some Chinese coconut fibre traders. "Ni Zhongguoren ma?" "Oh, you speak Chinese? Where are you from? Want to come over for dinner with us?" and now I have friends who I meet every weekend. If you want to make friends online, and miss the days of long conversations on MSN Messenger, try QQ. Several strangers have added me, just wanting to make friends with someone outside China. If you're concerned about language, you can use Google Translate. To save on copy-pasting, I made YouLing for Mac: http://peterburk.github.com/youling http://peterburk.github.com/youling that automatically translates both ways. I was also very shy and a victim of bullying when I was younger, so have hope! There are millions of people like you, and more who have had the same struggles before. Peter