What is your honest opinion of Eastern Europeans?

[tellmehowitis]

Name changed for this.
I've been in England for nearly a decade and have tried to integrate but so far the friends I have are other Eastern Europeans such as Polish, Latvian, Romanian etc. and also a few Spanish, Portuguese, Italian.

My experiences of English people (women especially) have been as follows:
-seeming friendly and saying things like "we should go for coffee/drinks" but not actually meaning it.
-most locals already have a social circle and don't seem to want to add to it (or don't want to add me specifically).
-if friendships do develop people will at some point suddenly decide they don't like me anymore for no reason (well there obviously is a reason but they don't say what it is).
-people blank me or act condescending. A woman on a course I was on actually turned away and looked at the ceiling when I said "hi, how are you", even though the previous day we'd had a perfectly pleasant chat. I couldn't think of what I could've said to offend, it was all general small talk like where we're from and what uni we went to etc. This has happened a few times with different people.

Maybe I'm just not likeable...but then there are no problems with people of other nationalities. I think I'm "normal" and not some weirdo, I speak English, have a job and am not here to "sponge" or any of the other stereotypes.

It didn't used to bother me too much but now I'm considering my long term future...even though materially speaking I have a nice life here I'm thinking of moving back home to settle down, because feeling like an outsider takes its toll emotionally.

I'm just curious though, what is it about me that locals don't like...is it my personality specifically that doesn't fit here, or is it because of my nationality? (It was the same before Brexit, so can't blame that).
If you're EE do you have English friends? And if you're English, would you be friends with an EE person? What do you honestly think of us as a whole?

I do think that some Eastern Europeans (particularly men) can come across as a wee bit stern (compared to us in the UK who dance around what we want to say) and aren’t likely to smile at people they don’t know. I just take it as a cultural difference, but it can be a bit of a shock to some!

I'm English and would happily be your friend!
I have all sorts of friends, I know a number of Spanish and Polish people, one person from Peru, one person from Latvia and a couple of Russians. They are all friends who came to the UK to work.

I like people who are friendly, open, honest and fun. It doesn't matter what nationality they are or where they originated from....if they are unkind and unfriendly then I avoid them, obviously. I like making friends and would welcome a friend from eastern Europe...BREXIT has nothing to do with it, I shall always be the same.

I have no opinion of them as I don’t actually know any but I’ve had a lot of what you described as well so I think it’s not you and it’s actually quite common.

On the social circle issue you mentioned, I wouldn't necessarily think this is because of your nationality. I am British but when I moved down to the SE from the North I definitely noticed people there already had their fixed friendship groups from school/uni and weren't terribly interested in adding to that. Most of my friends made in the SE have been from other countries.

Honestly OP I think having friends from different backgrounds, countries etc. is only beneficial, and if these women you have met can't see that, it's their loss.

I generally have a very good impression. I lived in a city for a while that had a high number of polish people and became friends with a few. Like any bunch of people, there are good and bad eggs.

I don’t hear racist comments about people from Eastern Europe - or anywhere else. I actually think most British people are remarkably welcoming despite various views championed otherwise.

My polish friend used to joke that thousands of British people going to Poland for work wouldn’t have been tolerated there at all and would have caused major issues. I do have sympathy with people from smaller towns whose streets were transformed. It completely changed the feel of the place very quickly and I believe brexit happened because we didn’t let people air their discomfort over that without being labelled as racist

There are also some criminal gangs from Eastern Europe in parts of glasgow rendering some areas more dangerous at night. Again, we do need open conversations about how to tackle these issues without screaming at either side

I don’t really have an opinion, other than a friends family who are all 2nd gen polish, and a work colleague who actually is amazing and we get on very well there isn’t a lot of E Europeans where I live, in fact my mixed heritage kids (Asian) up the villages racial diversity notch by about a 1000

But generally if I like you we’d be friends, in terms of stereotyping I don’t think there are many negatives around here, generally hard working and the women are beautiful seem to be the sweeping beliefs of the judges round here, we reserve the negatives for gypsies and Asians

I think you may be falling foul of cultural differences not actual racism. The English often say we will meet and rarely mean it, we can be chatty one day and another would quite like people to fuck off and leave us alone (all politely of course), and social circles are quite closed.

I only realised this when I opened up to the Asian/Turkish/Moroccan friends groups (not this village) and they kept asking me around and MEANT IT. Odd

I am English and have lots of Eastern European friends. I live in London and the majority I met through work. What I will say is that a lot of them when I first met them I honestly thought they didn’t like me! British people tend to be a bit false polite, we smile when we may not feel like it, agree to coffee when we don’t want to etc. the Eastern European friends I have tend not to smile too much unless something is very funny, they are very direct and their sense of humour is very dry. I really love and respect this honesty now I am used to it but at first it did feel off putting, a little cold. This is just my observation but if it rings true to you then maybe they just need to get to know you better.

You have to do what makes you feel comfortable. If you feel an outsider, and think you'll be more comfortable moving back to EE then that's what you should do.

That said, it may be worth getting some coaching/counselling to help you come to terms with the social side of staying here, if you'd like to.

I don't think the problem is you being EE, it's you feeling left out and sidelined. Which is something people feel regardless of their nationality. Maybe Brits are hard to get to know, slow to open up- it's hard to say because it's my normal! I've often felt like you, though.

I'm incredibly culturally English. It takes me years to turn someone from an acquaintance into a friend. If I say let's meet for a coffee I mean it, but I don't know how to take that next step. It feels weird to me to then go "next Thursday at Costa?". Don't know why.

Actually, I have trouble believing people want to be my friend and I want to leave them plenty of room to politely reject me. I'm aware this actually leads to me rejecting people.

Most of my closest friends date from a period when my best friend was a Polish woman. She had none of these hang ups. My "let's meet for a coffee" was met with a "actually, you should come to my house for dinner tomorrow". Then she introduced me to so many people. Sadly, she was only in England for a year and a decade or so later we've lost touch but she changed my life.

I could have written your post, and I'm Scottish, living in England for 20 years.

It's almost definitely not you. I'm a Glaswegian and used to talking to all and sundry in a queue, on a bus etc. Where I am in England, the locals still look at me like I'm a weirdo when I start a conversation 😁.

I have no doubt that there are some British people who look down on people from Eastern Europe, and it may be worse depending on where you live. I know my (polish) friends son was shouted at for being polish and told to go home - not sure where they thought he might go, since he was born in the UK. And it's a rarity fortunately where we live as it's quite a multi-national area.

It's much harder to make friends as an adult, as you're right, a lot of people stay where they grow up and have a ready made friendship group. TBH, it's taken me nearly this long and 2 children to have friendship groups now, so I think a lot of it is time and opportunity.

I've heard other non-Brits complain about the "we should meet for coffee/ you should come round for dinner thing too".

It's just cultural.

If someone said to me "we should meet for coffee", I would probably think nothing further of it, it's social lubrication only - they need to say "Do you fancy going for coffee at X place at Y time" for me to assume it's an actual real invitation.

I have a fair few European friends, and have actually always felt that of all of them, my Polish friends seem to have the most similar sense of humour to mine, and I am always most relaxed with them - but it's a small sample size, so perhaps much more due to individual personalities than cultural similarities.

i had a polish friend,
different view points,
very tactless compared to me and not afraid of saying what she felt.

I've had a few friends over the last few years from Eastern Europe, and the one thing I have observed is how direct they are - they say exactly what they mean, whereas (as other posters have pointed out) British people don't always do this, usually out of politeness/awkwardness. Personally I really appreciate this, although sometimes I have been a bit taken aback at quite how honest and blunt some of my friends have been!

I also line manage someone from Eastern Europe at the moment. She is also very blunt and direct, sometimes to the point of almost rudeness. Again, I appreciate honesty, but I have to admit to feeling slightly offended in the past.

I used to work in a multi-culteral office with staff from all over the world and was close to colleagues from Ukraine and Russia. I liaised with Polish staff on a regular basis (thankfully English-speaking). I have continued my friendship with the Russian colleague years after leaving that job.

We used to have a polish family in the road I lived in as a child and they were lovely people who everyone got on with.

I think, it depends on what the person is like but also, yes, people have often formed their friendship groups and aren't bothered about expanding them (perhaps because they have no time left for anyone else).

As others have said, it's a very British thing, when you meet someone, to shuffle wordlessly past them, avoiding eye contact, for up to about the first five years of acquaintance, then, fairly suddenly, if your paths keep crossing for that amount of time, to all of a sudden fall into being best friends.

What do I think of eastern/central European people? No opinions, honestly. Someone who'd been here for the best part of decade I'd consider to be pretty much a Brit anyway.

I'm not British but I have Polish friends. I like them. Some people from sone regions are a bit creepy though to be honest - Croats always ask me suspiciously about my background because I have dark features and a Hebrew name. I am not Jewish but I don't like the tone with which I get asked to be honest. So that does scare me a little bit that they might think I am some 'undesirable' ethnicity (I am 85% from British Isles genetically).

I travelled a bit in E Europe in the early to mid 90s, so I have seen a little of how those countries have changed. The E Europeans I know here are hard working, funny, and mostly just as confused by some things here as the OP.

One thing is that depending on the country of origin, spoken English can sound harsh and the intonation makes us think you might be angry or scornful. (Same in Scotland tbh! I’m always getting told off by my not very Scottish family) Obviously OP you might have no accent at all but I thought I’d mention it.

I don’t have much of an opinion on them as a whole but we do have some lovely Romanian friends who have just moved to Holland as they don’t feel welcome here after Brexit, which is a shame.

The behaviour you describe sounds fairly typical of how English people are too each other too... I’m 30 and haven’t really made any new friends since leaving uni.

I moved to a different part of the UK a few years ago and made a couple of work friends, but it didn’t progress to seeing each other outside of work. I think it is really hard to make new friends as an adult.

Sorry, I know that doesn’t answer your question at all.

I have met so few that i don’t know whether my impressions are generalisable to a whole culture, or just the individuals i know.

i know a Romanian mum at school, had 2 ex-colleagues who were Romanian, and at a different work-place 2 Bosnian colleagues. They all, particularly the Romanians, dressed up in a way i would consider going out (verging on hen-party), just to leave the house - high heels, short skirts, full makeup. This isn’t slut-shaming, i genuinely think you should wear what you like, but the fact it was all of them always made me wonder if their culture was more sexist, ie if a woman’s worth was tied in to how attractive they were, and if so whether we would have values in common. I suppose now i think about it, i wonder whether i did not make any moves to get to know them better because of that assumption? I also had difficulty with one Romanian colleague telling me about how she had brought her mum over for free NHS treatment “because she [colleague] paid her taxes here” so she felt was entitled to treatment for her mum. I am a stickler for rules and that sat poorly with me, but i suspect wasn’t cultural, just one idiot.

Otherwise we got on fine, good colleagues just not close friends. I think it is often easier to base friendships on shared experiences/backgrounds which maybe why people tend to gravitate to their own/expat groups?

In my experience they are hard-working (although maybe I have just never met any of the alleged benefit scrounger ones), a bit more “traditional” than I am used to (male dominating the household), and smoke more than I am used to.

Our neighbours were Polish an initially I found the woman very blunt to the point of rudeness, but just put it down to language differences. In time we got on better and I was sad when they left (although happy that they’d been able to buy a house).

In terms of making friends, well, I think that just gets harder as you get older. I haven’t made many (any) new friends in the last 5 years or so, just through being busy with work/life.

I guess maybe I find that immigrants can be a bit insular, but I think that is true the world over - there are plenty of insular British enclaves in Spain for example.

I have several Eastern European friends. One of whom I met at baby group when we had our first babies. Most of the rest of us knew each other from NCT antenatal classes but she was on her own and didn't speak much English at all to start with, having only come over from Kosovo fairly recently. We took her under our wing and she's very much part of the group. I also have several Polish friends. There's not a huge population of Eastern Europeans where I live so there isn't a great deal of opportunity to meet more than I already have but I certainly would have no problems making friends with someone just because they're not British.

I have lived in lots of different countries and have found that the way people communicate (even within Europe) varies a lot. So English people, for example, will say things like "oh we must meet up and then never do it." People from other countries will be much more proactive at following up (actually, to an extent when an English person says that I think its fine to say "OK, how about x day" or "great idea, shall we swop numbers". Otherwise you will be talking about meeting up for 10 years. Then people from Southern Europe tend to just rock up without foreplanning causing consternation.
I now live in the Netherlands which makes the UK look super friendly and welcoming by comparison. Actually Dutch people are nice really - but it can take a long time to get invited to someones house. I used to think it was vibes I was giving of/that Im a foreigner but it is just the culture.

I'm fine with people from anywhere in the world. Love meeting people from other countries. When I first came to the UK (I grew up in Australia) I found that English people, particularly those from southern England, were quite stand-offish and difficult to get to know. I then ended up making friends with people from Asian countries or pretty much anywhere else! I do find Northerners more friendly, though.

I don't think it's you, specifically.

I think you are slightly mixing up two separate things here:

a) The cultural differences that anyone who moves to a different country just has to adapt to. The coffee thing. Thinking you've made a friend when someone has just been casually polite. I'm Swedish and I have exactly the same difficulties understanding how Poles and Russians, and Southern Europeans, for that matter, work socially. Learning social cues is part of learning the language.

This one is on you. Like learning not to curtsey when I first visited the UK as a child.

b) The undeniable fact that there is prejudice against Eastern Europeans in the UK, in a way that there isn't against some other nationalities. Not everybody, perhaps not most people, but enough that you're going to come up against it now and then and it hurts.

This one is not on you. It's them.