When you move abroad and slash your cost of living, everyone warns you about the visas, the exchange rates, and whether the tap water is safe to drink. The thing most people are quietly scared of, though, is much simpler, which is landing somewhere new and having no friends at all.
I get it, because that fear is exactly what everyone feels before they go. Here is the honest truth from my side of it though, and it surprised me completely. A place like Da Nang is one of the easiest spots on earth to make friends, so easy that within a couple of months my actual problem flipped. I was not lonely at all, I was running out of social battery, because there is genuinely more going on here than any one person has the time or energy for.
So this is everything that worked for me, the specific places and apps I still use every week, and the honest version of what building a social life abroad is really like. The short answer is that you barely have to try, so pick one hobby, show up to the same rooms a few times, and the rest happens almost on its own.
Yes, the first week is quiet, and then it flips
Back at Meta in New York, my social life was just handed to me for free. People were around me all day, lunches happened with zero planning, and coworkers turned into friends without me trying at all.
When you quit that job and fly across the world, that free social life disappears for a little while, and the first week or 2 in a new country can be genuinely quiet. This is the part everyone is afraid of, and it is real, so I am not going to pretend it does not exist.
The thing nobody tells you is how fast it flips. The moment you plug into even one group here, the quiet is gone, and it does not come back. Within a few weeks the opposite problem shows up, which is that there is always something on and always someone asking if you are coming.
You will run low on social battery, fast
This is the part I most want you to trust me on. In a city like this you will run out of social battery long before you run out of things to do, because there is just so much happening that no single person can ever keep up with all of it.
On any given day there is pickleball in the morning, a coffee crowd right after, someone hosting a board game night, a yoga class with the same friendly faces, a group dinner, a movie night, and three more things in a WhatsApp group you forgot you joined. You start saying no to plans, and it has nothing to do with being antisocial, you just physically need a night in to recharge.
I am telling you this so the fear flips in your head before you even go. The real skill you end up building abroad is protecting your own energy, because finding people turns out to be the easy part and the invitations simply do not stop. It is frankly golden for making friends, and honestly it is sometimes a little too good.
Find your people online before you land
So how do you plug in that fast? The single best thing you can do is start online, ideally weeks before you arrive. Almost every city with a foreign community runs on a web of WhatsApp groups and Facebook groups, and that is where the real information and the real people live.
Da Nang has large WhatsApp groups for newcomers, for buying and selling your motorbike, for every hobby you can think of, and for plain daily chatter, plus Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members who will answer any dumb question you have at 2am. I joined a pile of these before I landed, lurked for a bit to learn how the place talks, and then started actually replying and turning up to whatever was being organized.
This is how you get the map of a city fast. You learn where people play sport, which cafes everyone works from, when the dinners happen, and who the regulars are, all before you spend one lonely night wondering where everybody is hiding. Search the city name next to words like expats, digital nomads, or your hobby, and the groups show up in minutes.
A hobby is what builds the circle
Here is the single most useful thing I learned, and I wish someone had told me before I arrived. Trying to make friends head on, as the actual goal, almost never works, because two adults circling each other with no shared reason to talk is awkward for everybody.
What works is a hobby, especially one that runs on a fixed schedule, because then the friendship just grows quietly on the side while you are busy doing the thing. You show up for the activity, and the people come as a bonus.
I am not here to force a pile of hobbies on you. These are simply the ones that worked for me, so treat them as starters and swap in your own.
Pickleball. This was the big one for me. In Da Nang the courts at Union and Bien Dong are full of expats, and the easiest move going is to walk straight up to anyone playing and ask where they found the game. You will come away with a WhatsApp group link every single time, and that one link plugs you into a crowd that already meets several times a week.
The 10am coffee club. This one sounds almost too simple to count, and it was one of the best things I stumbled into. A regular morning coffee crowd at roughly the same time, the same easy energy every day, and after a couple of weeks those faces stopped being strangers and quietly became my actual friends.
Board game nights. A genuinely underrated way to meet people, because you sit at a table with total strangers for a few hours, argue over some ridiculous game, and by the time it wraps up you already have plans for the weekend. The game gives everyone something to do with their hands, so nobody has to sit there performing.
Yoga at Roots. Take a class at Roots Da Nang and just say hello to the people on the mats around you, because a fixed class time is one of the calmest ways to see the same faces on repeat. They also run a wonderful sound healing session that is worth going to on its own.
Movie nights at Ace Hub. Ace Hub runs a movie night every Thursday, and a low key weekly thing like that is perfect when you are new, since you can turn up completely alone, sit in the dark for 2 hours, and still walk out having met a few people.
The thing that makes all of these work is the repetition, far more than the specific activity. Pick a couple, become a regular, and let the same familiar faces slowly turn into real friendships.
The apps that actually help
A couple of apps did real work for me. For pickleball specifically, Reclub is the one to get, because it shows you the local sessions, who is playing, and lets you book straight in, so you are not stuck waiting on a group chat to tell you where to be.
Couchsurfing genuinely surprised me. Everyone remembers it as the free way to crash on a stranger's sofa, and its real value now is the hangouts and events, where travelers and locals meet up in a new city with almost none of the usual awkwardness, since everyone in the room is openly there to make friends.
Nomad Table was the other good one. It organizes dinners for nomads and remote workers, so you show up to a table full of strangers over a shared meal and leave with a few new contacts, which is a lovely shortcut in your first weeks somewhere new.
Two small honest notes
None of this is perfect, and there are 2 small things worth knowing, though neither one is a dealbreaker. The first is the local language barrier, which is very real. Most of the friends you make early will be other foreigners and the English speaking locals, because a deep friendship in someone's own language needs more Vietnamese than most of us pick up quickly, and it just helps to know that going in.
The second is churn, since a nomad city is always in motion and people cycle in and out constantly, on visa runs, on to the next country, or home for good. The upside is that there is always a fresh crowd arriving right behind them, so you are never short of new people to meet, and you get good at making a friend quickly. It keeps the whole thing feeling alive rather than settled, which honestly suits this kind of life.
The only thing you have to do is show up
If you take one thing from this, let it be that you do not need a clever plan or a big personality to make friends abroad, you just need to show up to the same few things more than once. The abundance takes over from there, and faster than you would believe.
I went from knowing nobody in Da Nang to having a full circle here within a couple of months, and it came entirely from picking up a paddle, joining the groups, and turning up to the same rooms until the faces had names. Finding people was never the hard part, and the only real challenge was learning to say no often enough to keep a few evenings for myself.
If you want the fuller picture of why I chose this life, I wrote about the best and worst of living in the USA, India, and Vietnam, the real cost of groceries and daily life here, and the visa setup that makes staying possible.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you make friends when you move abroad?
Start online before you even land by joining the local WhatsApp communities and Facebook groups for the city, then pick one hobby that meets on a regular schedule, like a sport, a coffee club, or a board game night, and show up to it every single week. The friendships form as a side effect of doing a shared activity with the same people, which is far easier than trying to befriend strangers with no reason to be there.
Is it hard to make friends living abroad?
Honestly, far less than you fear. The first week or 2 can be quiet, and then in a place like Da Nang it flips completely, because there is so much going on that the real challenge becomes protecting your social battery rather than finding people. Commit to one recurring hobby or one regular place, and a full circle tends to build itself within a couple of months.
How do digital nomads make friends in a new city?
Mostly through local WhatsApp and Facebook communities, hobby meetups like pickleball, coffee clubs, and board game nights, coworking and studio spaces where the same crowd shows up, and apps built for meeting people, like Reclub for pickleball, Couchsurfing hangouts, and Nomad Table dinners.
Where do you meet other expats in Da Nang?
The easiest places are the pickleball courts at Union and Bien Dong, a regular morning coffee club, board game nights, a class at the Roots yoga studio, and the Thursday movie nights at Ace Hub. Show up a few times, ask someone for the WhatsApp group link, and you will have a circle within a month.
This is a personal account of how I built a social life after moving to Da Nang, and communities, studios, and apps change over time, so treat the specific names as a starting point and find the current version for your own city.