Staying Connected to Friends Across the Globe During the Pandemic
It was the 25th college reunion that never took place in spring 2020. As the world buckled down for one of the worst times in our history, our group of college friends joined Zoom just like everyone else to connect and catch up with each other. This turned out to be the next best thing for us, as we don’t normally get to see each other often throughout the years. We are all scattered around the globe. I’m on the East Coast, one of us is on the West Coast, one in Honolulu, one in Bangkok, and one in Tokyo. We usually rely on one or two of us to make the occasional trip for either work or family in order to see each other in person. Those visits are few and far between. During the lockdown, we had three or four Zoom calls and it has been great catching up. Seeing how everyone was doing and handling work, family, and life in general was helpful and comforting. I was also interested in learning firsthand how other parts of the world are managing the pandemic.
As you can imagine, coordinating the time to Zoom had its challenges due to the differences in multiple time zones. When the friend from the West Coast relocated to Amsterdam for work (yes, during the pandemic), time zone management was further put to the test. With the help of a spreadsheet, we developed a new Zoom schedule (see below). I got lucky on getting the best time on the schedule. My poor friend in Amsterdam has to stay up past midnight and the friend in Bangkok is getting up at 6 am. The new schedule limits our conversation to an hour. One of us has to go to bed!
As we still don’t get to travel to places afar we recently decided to share pictures of our surroundings and/or local trips. I was so surprised (and I shouldn’t have been) that the pictures we shared are so stunning. Do these pictures make me yearn even more for traveling? Absolutely! I was happy to see photos of all these gorgeous places and glad that my friends live in such travel-inspired locales. I hope one day to visit each of my friends in their beautiful cities.
