Blind dates

I am well versed when it comes to having blind dates with complete strangers – girls, that is. (Gee, and define “complete strangers” – people, I have at least had a couple of email exchanges with, if not whole online conversations before the meeting, and of which I’ve possibly seen a photo or two, admittedly.)
Nevertheless, there is always a risk (and very high expectations) when you finally meet in person.

Will you hit it off? Did you create a somewhat truthful picture of the person in your head? Will you be positively surprised or disappointed?

So far, I have to say that I had a 98% success rate with my “not so blind dates”. Some of those shaped up to become some of the closest friendships I’ve ever had (hello lovelies! you know who you are ;)) and I wouldn’t want to miss those friends for anything the world! I’ll be forever grateful for the works of the Internet, which have come in especially handy for people like me, who search for like-minded people that are in similar situations (read: living in a foreign country, being in bi-national relationships, etc).

Today, I had another one of those blind dates with a girl – the first German girl I’ve met here in Sacramento so far. I’ve been a member of the German Meetup Group for about a year and besides some Americans with German origin, I have met a couple of nice German guys through the group, but there were no German girls. However, last week, S signed up. She sent me a message through the website last weekend, we decided to meet for coffee today.
I was so excited to finally meet another German girl, but at the same time I was a little hesitant to be too cheerful, because I didn’t want to jinx it. After all, she could have been one of the 2% of cases that I didn’t get along with at all.

Turns out, she seems to belong somehwere in the top half of the 98%… from what I can tell so far from our introductory meeting. There was no awkwardness, no reservation… we started chatting away the instant we recognized each other in front of the coffee house :) What a relief!
Talking to her was so “easy”… and I don’t know how many times we both exclaimed “No way”, “Really? Me, too”, “Get out of here…” because we had so much in common or felt the same way about certain things :) It was heart-warming.

I can hardly wait for our next meeting.