By that I mean meeting someone in person whom you’ve only known online before!

Today I met Dr. Kathleen Jobe, an emergency room physician who is in my Cada Día Spanish class. One of the regular practices of the class is to say where you zooming in from and how’s the weather, so we all know that I’m from Hawaii, along with my friend Cindy Scheinert, who is also a parishioner at the Lutheran Church of Honolulu where I was organist for 35 years. But we all know that Kathleen is from Seattle, and I was determined to meet her while I am here for the Peter Hallock concerts.

We made plans to meet at lunchtime and Kathleen asked what kind of food I wanted to eat, so I decided on Mexican, since there are few if any good Mexican restaurants in Hawaii. Besides, it would be a good opportunity to practice our Spanish! Kathleen decided upon a restaurant nearby called D’La Santa, which turned out to be an excellent choice. The wait staff was from Guatemala, so we indeed tried out our Spanish . . . and they understood us!

Kathleen then took my picture.

Kathleen has an advantage over me in that she studied Spanish in high school, and has also lived in Mexico for awhile. I only started Spanish four years ago when my daughter-in-law challenged me to learn Spanish — before then, the only Spanish words I knew were “taco” and “burrito!”

I am so happy that I discovered Cada Día Spanish (which means Spanish Every Day) because no matter how my day is going, at the end of the class I’m happy and in a good mood. The concept of learning through playing games is the hallmark of their approach, and it’s always fun! The entire class is in Spanish and I have to admit that at the beginning, I probably only understood about 5% of the class and what was happening. Now, though, I think I am at about 95% comprehension and it’s all good.

But a big part of the Cada Día Spanish is the community that it has created, in spite of the fact that most of us have not met in person. We have students from all over the world, including the United States, Europe, the Middle East and even Japan. That’s why it was so fantastic to meet our teachers, Ignacio “Nacho” Medina and Barbi Aviles in Uruguay and Argentina, respectively, in addition to traveling with two other members of our class, Marsha and Janice. Seems like people are even nicer in person!

I was so surprised to learn that our teachers, Nacho and Barbi, have never met in person (!) but I can say now that I’ve met one more person in our little community, and it feels fantastic.