Homesick in Berlin and what to do?

Have you just arrived in Berlin or have you already been living for quite a while here in Berlin?  Feelings of homesickness can appear from time to time while living abroad.

Have you just arrived in Berlin or have you already been living for quite a while here in Berlin?  Feelings of homesickness can appear from time to time while living abroad. Do they make you feel sad or frightened?

Sometimes you have left your home country, your home town or village for adventurous reasons. Sometimes there was just no alternative to this or you felt rather safe in leaving for Germany. And yet Berlin has a lot to offer with its creative industry, its internationality and its openness for diverse forms of living and its stability. Sometimes, this step away from home can also come about because things at home annoyed you, became redundant or were just very dangerous. Here in Berlin you might miss your family and your friends, the things with which you grew up and the places you have known for ages.

This can give you a hard time at times and you have to build up from scratch your network of friends and acquaintances. What people find helpful in these circumstances is developing some sort of routine and structure particularly if everything is quite new to them. You will possibly have the supermarket that is your central shopping point, you might chat a little to the women in the bakery and at your corner shop. You travel within Berlin taking the same routes to see friends and you have regular meetings with them in the same location. Being at places in Berlin that you know, gives you more grounding, so that everything that was very new becomes a central part of your life and starts to feel like home. It might sound odd, but if you have developed a sense of familiarity for your favorite café, bistro, corner shop, supermarket, bakery or grocery store, then you have already managed a great deal when it comes to making the city your home.

Another step will be finding people who are really interested in you not just those who are only interested in having a drink with you. This is most difficult particularly if you are not used to starting a conversation with a stranger. It becomes easy though in places where you share a common interest, maybe in a language group meeting of meetup Berlin, maybe in a pub, at an exhibition, in your sports group or in a women’s group at one of the centers for women in Berlin. The shared experience is already the common ground for you to start a relation to a person you do not know yet.

Having a stable network of friends and acquaintances as well as a good feeling for places in Berlin prevents you from having major difficulties while living in Berlin. This, however, can only be done slowly and does not happen from one day to another. You have to give yourself ample time for all this to happen.

06/2017