I can’t tell you how many friends from the past I’ve been able to rekindle contact with because of this blog… it’s cool, because people will somehow stumble upon this blog (or my old, out of date, long neglected Web site) and find out what’s more or less going on in my life, then send an e-mail to say hello, perhaps mentioning recent events.
For the first time, though, my blog has served to reconnect me with one of my Swedish relatives, who for the sake of convenience I’ll simply call a cousin, and who I’ve met only once way back when I was only 13 years old. He had just finished his last year of high school, which he did in Minnesota while staying with some of my dad’s family there. His parents and grandparents flew over to the U.S. for his graduation, and then their family met up with my parents, brother, and cousin in Florida (they were there to go to Disney World, what else?). It was all very strange for me, a relatively sheltered 13-year-old with such a small world view, suddenly to find out we had relatives in an entirely different country and, even stranger, they were coming to visit?
Of course, my outlook on the world is much different now… and since (even though I completely failed to blog about it here) we only JUST recently got back from our 2+ weeks in Europe, getting his e-mail this morning was all the cooler. From the many places Daniel and I visited in Europe, Stockholm (Sweden) was by far our favorite. I waxed poetic about it in e-mails to our family the night we left, but I guess I never mentioned it at all here. Oh well… suffice it to say, I completely fell in love with Sweden (above all the other countries we visited) during our brief visit there, and the whole time I was keenly aware that my dad’s family comes from that country, and has only in the last few generations not lived there. It was gorgeous, vibrant, energetic, clean, and just generally fabulous.
At any rate, I’m just forever reminded of how much smaller our world is now with this amazing technology at our disposal. With a few well-worded Google searches and clicks of the mouse, someone I met 16 years ago sent me an e-mail this morning. It’s just so amazing.