Once again, I’m committing to Blogtober, but whether I’ll make it happen or not is another thing. One day I’ll manage all the days without having to catch up at weekends or something like that. For now, Happy Blogtober.
How do you make friends as an adult in a new city?
When you’re a kid and you attend school you can almost just run up to someone in the playground and be like “do you want to be my friend?” I think if I did that as an adult, I’m sure I’d get some very strange looks and people would think I had lost the plot.
Well, that was the challenge. Chris was worried I was becoming a hermit and didn’t know anyone. So after finding me a couple of International/Expat groups on Facebook I posted in one for “International Mums”. The first response was just saying hi and not particularly very helpful but then I got some from a lovely lady who turned out to be from North England. Win! (Chris always says northerners are so much friendlier than Southerners lol).
So my new friend S and I set about booking in a coffee date/park date. She has 3 kids. Her youngest is 3 and loves exploring different parks. I imagine he and Jaxon would get on very well exploring the park together but it was Rex that I had with me as it’s a school day.
We’d got a plan to meet at Nørreport Station and then walk from there. Google told me 15 minutes on the bike do I tried to leave with 20-25 well even then I’d still misjudged it between traffic lights and roadworks along the route (also a scary hook turn that didn’t quite make sense. Might need to get Chris to walk me through that one because I was upsetting other cyclists but didn’t know any better… Oops!)
We made it to Nørreport Station but we were running about 10 minutes late. Thankfully, S understood and got us hot drinks to take with us to the park while she waited for us. At first, we couldn’t find each other as we were opposite ends of the station area but once we’d described where we were stood we realised we weren’t that far away from one another and we then met.
We walked from the station to the park at Ørstedparken so that the boys could have something to do while we chatted and drank our drinks. S is from the UK too, so we could compare life here versus life there and then moan about the things that we miss from home (yes I miss things and I’ve only been here two weeks!). We ran a couple of errands together too while we were in that area and chatted about all sorts. After what seemed like ages (in a good way) we headed back to the station so S could catch the train and I could get our bike. After saying goodbye to S, Rex and I wandered back to Chris’s work and said hello as it was almost the end of his day. We got to see his colleague again (who played taxi driver on our first day here) and meet his team.
Chris had commented that there are so many cargo bikes in Copenhagen, that it’s handy to have something that distinguishes your bike from others. So I’ve started a sticker collection. These two dinosaurs are from NiftyNotebooksNI over on Etsy. I’m going to need to start to find some other stickers to add to them. After hanging out with S, Rex and I then headed home while Chris went to collect Jaxon from school.
We’d already planned that we would go to Kulternatten. So what is Kulturnatten? Well across the city of Copenhagen more than 250 museums, theatres, libraries, churches, ministries and parks open their doors with different events. The great thing is that your ticket for Kulturnatten (which was a badge), gives you free travel on the Metro and the Bus network from 4 pm right through to 4 am.
Once the boys got in from the school run we inhaled some food then set out on our adventure. I had hoped to plan a better route and be able to get us to more places but by the time Chris had told me I was making the plans, it was a bit too late. We started at Little Pink Maker. It was lovely to see Nel again as well as collect my goodies from the workshop in the summer. We also visited The Round Tower and Cinemateket.
