After thinking about all the things I wrote to KC about how I made friends (
http://polyamory.com/forum/showpost.php?p=330074&postcount=28), I feel very privileged to live where I live (and to be born in a well educated and reasonably ok economically suited family).
A lot of my social activities might not have been possible at all, if I lived in some rural area of US, or pretty much anywhere else in the world.
Instead, I live in a city and a country, where not having a drivers licence does not limit my mobility at all. I easily feel safe enough to go nights home alone by public transport, or even to walk. A city is big enough to have people with pretty any kind of weird hobby I can imagine. And I still get to the centre within an hour, even at nights. Not to mention there is complete freedom to hold an opinion and relatively high social tolerance to differences - it's safe for me to be out to most friends about polyamory for instance (though my mom would not be thrilled about neighbours or family knowing).
When I was 10 we would live abroad in a much smaller town. It was torture, I really had no one to speak to. I do attribute it partly to lack of skills, but still, it seemed no one was reading the same books (actually my peers didn't read at all), there was no chess club (I wanted to play chess),.. It was such a relief when we got back, I went to a good school, and I found the fantasy&sci-fi community. It took all of my teens and early twenties to get any comfortable around people, to understand how I can actively choose my friends, and to learn the basics of group interaction... and it's a process until today. I still get anxious sometimes.
I'm so grateful that I live where I live and how I live. Because it made meeting like-minded, weird enough, and tolerant enough people possible, even easy, and it enabled me to choose any hobby I wanted, and it's only getting better.