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Making friends in China is pretty easy if you're a student.
Every university that I know of has the English Corner, which is an organisation that brings
Chinese and English speaking students together.
It's mostly for finding language partners, but friendship can come out of it.
If you're not interested in finding a language partner, but just want a Chinese friend to
hang out with and show you around the city, you can try joining a club. For instance,
I'm in the tea club and thanks to that I know some good tea places to go to and today I
even went to a very big tea event.
There are a bunch of different kinds of organisations. For instance here in BLCU, besides the tea
club I mentioned, there are a couple of martial arts clubs. Besides Kung Fu, there's also
Taekwando and Karate I think. There are sports organisations like football, basketball, tennis
any sport that's popular here, there's a club for it. There are a couple of cultural clubs.
There's a singing club. I think there's also a physics and an astronomy club. Basically,
just look around on campus. Ask around. Maybe your teacher knows something, maybe your fellow
students know something. But, chances are, there are a ton of clubs on your campus that
you might not even know of that you will be interested in and where you can find many
good friends.
If you're not really into joining clubs, you can also go out. For instance, when I go out
by myself to a bar, often times a couple of Chinese people will approach me and try to
hang out with me.
If none of those are your things, you can also use WeChat or QQ, which I talked about
in an earlier video. WeChat and QQ have functions where you can find random people online and
try to talk with them. A lot of them are swing-and-a-miss though. I won't go into too much details,
but not all of them were looking for friends.
If you're not a student, it might be a bit more difficult. I'm not sure, I haven't experienced
that yet. But, I think there are some expat-Chinese get togethers as well for people that work
here in China. It's usually in the bigger cities I think, so I'm not sure if there's
one in a smaller city. But, Beijing and Shanghai should have a couple.
And of course, WeChat and QQ would work as well if you're not a student.
Do you live in China and did you find friends in a different way than I just mentioned?
Let me know in the comments.
Or if you have any questions, leave them in the comments as well and I'll answer them
on the last day of VEDA.
See you tomorrow.
Bye.