Friends of Gabriel Chantayan

My mother calls from München for the third week and asks: "Lukas, have you made real American friends yet?" I told her about my lab partner in Syntax who once said a sentence was "kind of passive I guess." This satisfied her, but it is not a real answer - the category "real friend" resists definition the same way a chicken wrap resists quartering. She wants something I cannot provide because I do not know what she means by "real," and I am not sure she knows either. Has anyone here found a translation for this word that actually works across the Atlantic, or do we simply accept the category error?