Moved north from Bavaria and spent a year thinking I had offended everyone
Posted as too_quiet_at_first
- Looking for
- somebody local who will forgive a southerner for talking too much
- Experience
- Six years, both sides, all of it somewhere warmer.
- Around
- St Pauli side, Hamburg
For about a year I was convinced I had done something wrong. People were perfectly polite and nothing ever went any further, and where I come from that combination means you have caused offence. It took a colleague to explain that here it means nothing at all and that I should simply keep turning up.
Thirty one, switch, St Pauli side, moved here three years ago for work. Six years in this, all of it in the south, where the circle was smaller and warmer and considerably nosier.
What I have learned since is that people here do open up, at a pace I would previously have described as geological, and then they stay, which is the reverse of what I was used to and which I have come to prefer. I have two friendships now I would trust with anything.
So I am posting with a great deal more patience than I had two years ago. I lead slightly more than I follow. I want something long, with structure, that grows slowly and does not need defining by the third meeting. I am still too loud, I still ask questions people here consider personal, and I have stopped apologising for either.
Not looking for anyone who wants my opinion on the weather, which I keep to myself. Not looking for a person who will find a southerner an amusing novelty. Not looking for anything fast, which is a sentence I could not have written when I arrived.