I made all my best friends at after parties. We'd spend weekend after weekend chatting shit to each other for about 40 hours solid.
With hindsight I can see that, here in Lisbon, we made all our friends pretty much at after-parties.
Just before we moved here, or soon after, whatever, I read some kind of guide to Portugal or to moving here or whatever that said something along the lines of
"Portuguese people are very friendly in the sense that they will be polite to you and smile and so on - but in terms of making real friends, you won't be able to do it, cos they have friends already and they don't want to make space in their friendship group for people from another country."
This has not been our experience at all, and my guess is, that the person who wrote that, has never been to any after-parties.
When we had been here a month or two, we were at a crappy club and we got talking to this guy who invited us to this place Eka, which is basically a drug market with some music in one of the rooms that goes on until about 2pm I guess. While we were there we got talking to some more people, and one of them very kindly invited the two of us back to his place with four or five others. And since then we've been very good friends with that guy, attended hundreds of similar parties at his place and met thousands of people there, maybe like half of our friends. And he owns part of a restaurant with some other people which we also ate at a lot, and hung out at a lot, and met a lot of other people there.
Then, after DJ-ing at Le Baron and we'd become increasingly friendly with one of the bar-staff there - one time he invited us back to his place at about 9am where we met, well basically, the other half of our friends (or at least people who would lead us to the other half of our friends). That's like the gay half of our friends I guess.
But it's interesting, we have been (I'd like to think) pretty well accepted into both of those groups and we hang out with loads of them independently and so on. One time one of the guys pointed out something that we had not noticed - everyone else in that group where we were hanging out is Portuguese. Or there may be a couple of Brazilians or whatever... but we are very much the exception, so maybe there was some truth in that thing we read about Portuguese not tending to want to form friendships with foreigners. So thank fuck for after-parties I say.