It can be scary moving to a new place. Everything seems so different from where you used to live. There's a new house, new streets, new people and new places. It might take a while for you to find your way around, and you might even get lost once or twice. You may really begin to miss your friends back home. Moving to a new country can sometimes be even scarier. Not only is everything new and different, but the language and culture may be completely brand new to you, too!
The best way to start feeling at home in a new place is to integrate yourself into the community. What does that mean? A community is a group of people who share common interests or characteristics, and integration means combining two different parts into a whole. When you integrate into a community, you begin to learn more about other people's beliefs, traditions and values, and may even begin to adopt some of them yourself as you become part of the community. For example, people in Germany are generally much more eco-conscious than people in the United States. The longer I stay in Germany, the more I find myself sorting my recycling, reusing shopping bags and taking shorter showers, to name a few things. The more you learn about a community, the less scary it seems and the more it starts to feel like home!
