I didn’t think I needed a Filipino community in Dresden. I told myself I was there to immerse, to make German and international friends, to not cling to home. Six weeks in, I found myself in a Filipino grocery two train stops away that I’d found almost by accident, holding a jar of bagoong I didn’t even really want, just because reading the label out loud to myself felt like something.

What I got wrong early on was treating “finding community” and “fully experiencing my new country” as if they were in competition. They’re not. The Filipino students I eventually met in Dresden — through a small, informal group chat someone had started years before I arrived — were some of the same people pushing me to try things outside my comfort zone, because they’d already tested the waters themselves and knew what was worth doing. Community didn’t shrink my world. It gave me a safe base to explore a bigger one from.

Finding that group took more effort than I expected, mostly because it wasn’t advertised anywhere official. It came from asking around — messaging a Filipino student whose name I found in an old university newsletter, joining a regional Facebook group for Filipinos in Saxony, showing up to a Philippine Independence Day gathering organized by the local embassy contact even though I knew no one there yet. Almost every lasting connection I made abroad started with me doing something slightly uncomfortable first.

If you’re about to move somewhere with no existing Filipino network that you know of: look for embassy-organized cultural events, university international student associations, and regional Facebook groups before you even land — they exist in more cities than you’d expect, even ones without a large Filipino population. And don’t wait until you’re lonely to look. Build the connection while things are still going well, so it’s already there on the harder days.