International friendship can be extremely rewarding, educational, and can broaden a person's view beyond the culture and ideas they live in. For me, the habit of making international friends started by accident when I met someone from South America in a chat room; we became fast friends and have been talking to each other for six years. In the time we have been speaking (through e-mail, instant messenger, voice chats and telephone conversations) we have both grown from high school students to adults concerned with family and work. While I have turned into a full-time at-home freelancer, he has gone on to an advanced degree and is always busy with school work so recently I have felt the need to find more people to talk to for all the times he's not around, specifically because I finally decided to buckle down and learn Spanish in earnest (as opposed to my half-hearted attempts at learning) and I wanted more native Spanish speakers to talk to.
I have a love of languages, so when I found a language exchange site I like I put German, Russian, Italian, Spanish and French in my profile as languages I would like to learn and started finding friends from everywhere...in fact, now I speak to a few people who are native speakers of each of those languages as well as people who are willing to teach me Chinese, Tagalog and Arabic. Now I regularly communicate via instant messenger and voice chat with people in Uruguay, Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, India, Turkey, China and the Philippines.
So what have these friendships done for me aside from helping me learn new languages? A little background...I come from a very small town in Wyoming, I have never lived anywhere other than Wyoming and have not been able to travel to other parts of the world (yet) so all I know firsthand is the culture and way of life in a Christian-dominant rural agricultural community which is an extremely narrow view of the world.
I love to learn new things, am fascinated by history and like to know what happened in the past that made the world what it is today. Through the people I have met online I have learned about the culture and way of life in all these different countries; they often make me think in ways I'm not accustomed to and always leave me wanting to learn more about where they live. Inevitably books on each of these places make it into my reading list and I can say with all authority that I have learned much more about world history, politics, culture and religion in the last two months than I ever did in school or day-to-day life.
Because of the vast resources of the internet it's exceedingly easy to find people to talk to in other countries and forge lasting friendships. Granted, just jumping into your favorite social networking site and talking to anyone and everyone may not be the most efficient or reliable way to find international friends. What other options are out there?
As mentioned above, the best way I've found to meet new people is through language exchange. Limiting yourself to a single language will necessarily limit which people you can talk to. Language exchange has the added bonus of automatically giving you something in common - you're both pursuing learning a new language - and brings together people who are curious about other countries and excited to meet people from them.
Alternatively, there are plenty of "pen pal" social sites where you can meet people from all over the world for friendship, love or study. These sites tend to attract all kinds of people and, depending on what you're looking for, may either make it more difficult to find friends with similar interests or it may open up an unbelievable range of other possibilities.
Get out and look! Nearly every kind of service available for meeting people within your country is also available specifically for international friendships and relationships. Chat rooms, message boards, networking sites, language exchange, online tutoring...these are just a few possibilities for finding international friendship.
I believe that learning about other places is very important to understanding how the world works, how our resident countries are affected by others, how to relate to the rest of the world and so on; books can teach these things to a point, but there really is no substitute for learning these things from the people who live and breath these cultures and who grew up hearing the histories and folk lore of their countries.