Fish out of water

Now, I like making new friends, and even if I'm feeling shy, I will still make an effort to get to know people purely because I'd feel rude if I didn't. I found myself in a situation today where my cousin invited me along to hangout with her friends. That sounds fine right? Well, let me put this into context. I'm pretty terrible at speaking Vietnamese and my cousin is an international student who moved to the US 5 years ago from Vietnam. All of her friends at this particular gathering spoke Vietnamese as their first language. I felt like a big fat fish out of water at first, but after getting past the initial shyness, the night turned out to be pretty good. I guess I was lucky because my cousin stayed close the whole time, but thinking back on it now, the fun only started when I really threw myself into this unfamiliar situation. It's never occurred to me before what people my age from other countries do when they hang out, but this gave me a nice idea of exactly that...and you know what, we're all much the same. Tonight we played Dance Central on the Kinect, ate bucket loads of snacks and sung karaoke. No matter what language is spoken, when friends get together like this, everybody understands what it means to have fun.