Things You Miss When You Move To A New City
Moving to a new city is always a new exciting adventure, filled with fun places to discover and people to meet and make friends with. However, there are always those times when you miss the place you came from or grew up at. If you tend to think about all these things and feel a bit nostalgic from time to time, we here at citysocializer have some tips you might find useful.
1. Familiar streets with lots of memories.
The place where you grow up is usually full of memories. You with your friends playing as kids, walking around in spring and summer to pass the time, returning home from nights out with your mates in the early hours of the morning, if only those streets could talk. Now every street is new, you don’t have any fun things that have happened there before to think of when you walk by.
Tip: Think of the new streets as a blank canvas. You can make sure you create some new memories and have some control over them. Get some ice cream in summer and walk around your new city. Buy something you had your eyes on for yourself and take a selfie with a new friend. Then you’ll have a new memory of that day you had a lovely walk with a new friend and you also have this nice top to remind you of it every time you wear it too.
2. A group of friends to go out with whenever you want.
If you grew up with the same group of friends your entire life, moving away may seem a bit hard, especially if most of them are still back home and life goes on as usual for them. You keep seeing all the fun things they all do together on facebook and you’re the only one not there.
Tip: Good friends will still love you even when you’re away in a new city and they will miss you just as much as you miss them. Make sure to keep in touch and visit when you can and it will be like you never left. In the meantime, make some new friends in your city and create a new group. Meet new people based on your interests and the things you like doing instead of simply because you ended up in the same school. This way you will end up forming some great new friendships.
3. A local you can go to see everyone you know.
If your hometown has one main high street it’s very likely all the people you knew usually went out in a very limited number of bars and you had a local for you and your friends, where you could just drop in and find half of them chilling in their free time. This is much harder to do in a big city, so you can not run into people unless you make plans to meet up and travel to a specific bar.
Tip: Get to know your neighbours and work colleagues and find the nearest pubs to your home and office. Then start suggesting going to those pubs on a regular basis until it turns into a habit. Think of it as a practical experiment in neurolinguistic programming with bonus drinks. Then you get to have not only one but two locals.
4. Inside jokes with people you can refer back to.
One of the best things you get to have with your friends are inside jokes. You’ve spent so much time together that now when something happens you instinctively have the same reactions and can just look at each other to know what you are thinking before bursting out laughing. However, in your new place no one knows those jokes so you either laugh by yourself or stay silent wishing your old friends were there to see it.
Tip: If it was funny enough to become an inside joke, chances are it will also make a good story for your new friends. Tell them what this incident reminds you of and share something personal with them. They will get to know you better and you may get to let some new people in the joke too.
5. Knowing all the best places to go for the things you need
Local knowledge that came with years of growing up and living in your old city meant that you knew exactly where to go for everything. From fresh groceries, to DIY supplies, to restaurants and bars. Now you have to learn everything from scratch again, from figuring out what the best takeout in your area is to the best places for a night out.
Tip: Look for local blogs and guides like TimeOut, as well as websites with reviews of local businesses such as Yelp and TripAdvisor. Lists with the ‘best places for X’ are also a great resource and you can treat them like checklists. To make this even more fun just turn it into a group adventure, bring some new friends along and go explore your new city. Once you’ve been to a few new places you can then make your own lists and rate the places you visit for future reference or to help other newcomers.
Once you start figuring your new city out it will feel a lot more like home and you’ll miss your old city less. And you can use citysocializer to have a ready made social life right from the beginning and just join up at any socials you like the look of so that you do not waste any time staying home alone. New city sorted!
