Last night I had one of the more interesting experiences of my adult life, Melanie and I had dinner with a friend I met through Jinzora about a year and a half ago, Wim and his significant other Jacqueline. You see, the interesting thing here is they are from a small village in Holland and this is their first trip to the United States.

Wim found Jinzora about 18 months ago and started giving me great feedback. He's been VERY helpful and is also the #3 poster on our forums (third only to Ben and I). He has almost 4 times as many posts as the next closet poster and has been hugely helpful to our user community and deserves a huge thanks. He really is a big part of the success that we've had with Jinzora. As a very small token of our appreciation last night I gave him the first (and only so far) Jinzora branded baseball cap! We also let some of the donations we've received from Jinzora pay for dinner for the four of us .

So we didn't really know what to expect from Wim and Jacqueline (as I'm sure they didn't know about us either). While we've communicated a good deal in email and our forums we didn’t really know each other, not really. Well that wasn't an issue at all, we all got along great and didn't stop talking for nearly 4 hours! Hell, we even ran two different couples off that sat at the table next to us!! We talked about everything from Cheesecake (they had never had it before and since we went to The Cheesecake Factory we insisted they try some – and they loved it) to differences in healthcare, driving, technology - pretty much the whole range. It really was a great evening, and is something I will never forget. They came here to visit a lot of our national parks, with the main goal to see Yellowstone. We help a bit by sending them a list of the parks that we’ve visited so they’d know what to see (and what to skip). They have almost 4 weeks here (damn Europeans with all their vacation time!) so they have plenty of time to see the west. They have no real agenda, and haven’t even made any hotel reservations, rather planning on finding something wherever they land. Sounds great to me!!!

We also talked a lot about how small technology is making the world, that we can easily use IM, Skype, and email to communicate free and virtually instantly anytime, anywhere. The only thing we need to think about is the time difference, it really is that simple. When I started Jinzora I had no idea I'd make friends like Wim, let alone actually get to meet one! What a small, small world we really do live in, and I for one thing it’s great!

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