The real people

I am not quite sure if it is because times change or is it just me? But the previous post and the always interesting comments left me wondering, who are the real people?

My blog buddies are real even if there is a whole distance between our countries of residence. They live in England, Singapore, Finland, Guatemala, India, Hong Kong, France or the USA just to mention a few places in the whole wide world but they are certainly real. Their ideas are valuable and it is important to listen to their opinions (read actually) especially because I spend most of my time in front of a computer screen. I would dare say that most people nowadays do.

Some days ago I commented about my Salvadoran friends and how even if they are still my friends we are not really in touch despite the technological developments and we somehow concluded that nowadays most of my blog buddies know more about what is going on in my life than my friends who don’t bother to visit my blog or reply to my e-mails. Yet, if I sign in the msn it is most likely that I will end up spending a long time talking to them and the warmth of the relationship that we had/have can be felt even if we can’t go out for a pizza or rent a DVD together.

Is it because the times change that I don’t know who my neighbours are? That most of the comments in a recent Maltese TV show about friendship were along the lines of “my best friend is a dog because he doesn’t betray” or “God is my only friend”, Or that when I went to the gym I would exchange a few words with some of the people there but could never really find a friend there? Can some people make new friends through social networking tools? Perhaps, I was never interested in that so I can’t really say.

What I can say however is that for many years I had pen friends and they were also real people who lived in Russia, the Czech Republic, the Philippines, Portugal, France, Spain, etc. And though I was in my own country I felt the need to meet people of different cultures and who had interesting ideas.

I managed to meet two Spaniard pen friends some years ago and then I met the most important of all my pen friends: hubby! He was always a real person with whom I exchanged letters for several years, the relationship grew, we met and here we are now: married!

I believe that most of the people I call friends that I have met in Malta, I met them through the internet. At one point we hadn’t met face to face but when we did we clicked and now we are there: Lupideloop, T, Grego, Ninuhadida and all the rest of Maltese bloggers who went to the meeting, at least now there is a face in my mind behind the blog :) and it is up to us to develop the relationship if we want to. After all, it takes two to tango.

Of course there are other ways to meet friends such as the office or school. And that is always great. Though I have heard some people say that colleagues are colleagues and can’t really become friends. I tend to disagree. I have made some friends at work even if I am not friends with all the employees of the company which would not be realistic just as it wouldn’t be realistic to be friends with the whole classroom when at school.

Just to summarize, I think that there are friends who are no longer there physically but are however still there, and those friends who at one point I might not have perceived as “real” but I certainly didn’t perceive them as binary language or just ink on a piece of paper. There is always the chance of turning what it doesn’t seem so real into reality ;)