Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how sharing stories of being a mental health professional and academic, based more broadly on serendipity and searching in life, can serve as means for bridging and developing cross-cultural understandings and collaborative work. Design/methodology/approach: This paper is a relational autoethnography based on face-to-face and written conversational dialogue between five mental health academics from the UK and Norway. Findings: The very practice of writing this paper displays and serves the purpose of bridging people, cultures and understandings, at several levels, in the facilitation of new research and writing projects. Troubling traditional boundaries between "us" and "them, and the "knower" and the "known," the writing is theoretically underpinned by Friendship as Method, situated in a New Materialist context. Originality/value: Through its conversational descriptions and explorations the paper shows how doing relational autoethnography can be purposeful in developing cross-cultural understandings and work at both professional and personal levels. It also demonstrates how autoethnography as relational practice can be useful in the sharing of this methodology between people who are more and less familiar with it.