Advice on making new friends

So here you are in a foreign country and you left all your friends and are starting over.  Where do you start?  I am quite lucky I have some very good friends I met threw Prince Charming and they have been my saving grace since moving here and I love them to pieces.  Sometimes I do wish I had my own click and own friends so everything wasn't so intertwined.
This requires me to get out and meet people for goodness sake.
Where do you go?
Won't you feel like the pimple face 12 year old just starting a new school and trying to say hi to someone?
You don't want to be psycho and ask for someones number and have them guffaw do you?

Moving to a new country can almost be worse then starting a new school because a new country has different cultures and etiquette that some of us are obviously not aware of so you need to learn the rules first.  No one wants to be that crazy foreigner as its hard enough having someone rip your culture apart.  I love a bit of banter about how somethings I find crazy in this country and then hear how they find XYZ crazy about mine. It's all good in the hood when it's banter.

So meeting new friends is like dating and I thought I was done dating once I got married...not so much.
So getting out and joining a club or taking a class to meet people should be what I am doing but it's always easier said then done.  I hate being the new person with the accent. Full Stop.

Maybe I will make it a goal of mine to take one class on ANYTHING just to say I went and it wasn't that bad.  The problem isn't here, it's anywhere I hate showing up alone to a class where everyone already has a click because it reminds me so much of all the new schools I went to over my life.  Being the new person sucks but as someone once said, " get over it" so maybe I should.  I can dish out the advice but taking it is so much harder.

There is a great site called http://www.meetup.com/ which is worldwide (well at least in the US and the UK) but of course for me its a little farther away then  would like hmmm maybe I will create my own!

snow wife

"Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods."
- Aristotle