I'm an optimist and can't agree with that statement, sounds too pessimistic. No offence implied, just someone who found love, East Coast to West Coast, USA.

One if my online friends , fell for a man in Australia , she went to visit him , they fell in love , married . and she's happy with him to this day . Sometimes , though rarely , things actually do happen .

@Cast1es Noted, but beware of the hasty generalization fallacy. Relationships are tough enough, but long-distant ones are just fraught with peril.

I recall being in B.C. some 15 years, or so, ago and seeing travel ads in the malls for Cuba. As a citizen of the USA, this was initially puzzling to me until I realized where I was and that Canada didn't have the same outlook on/relationship with Cuba as the US gov't.

@Condor5 The first Prime Minister Trudeau, son of the current PM Trudeau, was a very close friend of Fidel Castro's. Little wonder Nixon is on tape calling our prime minister a son of a bitch, Canadians have always gone to Cuba on winter vacation, it's just funny to see the Americans who are trying to pretend they are Canadians because there government won't allow them to go there. Cuban customs doesn't stamp their passports, just gives them a slip of paper for the length of their vacation.

Hey, Aussies are always up for that drink.
Funny though, my son went to teh States 3 years ago to meet online friends, last year he did a lot of Europe and some of Asia for the same reason. We have had a lot of overseas visitors here both before and after that. We need to organise a virtual chat over a cold drink.

@Faithless1 The interesting people I notice here are often from OZ, so I was thinking the same thing. Right now I'm not far from Australia, since I'm in Thailand.

@birdingnut just spent the a couple of weeks in Thailand; Chiang Mai and Ao Nang. First visit; loved it. So much in fact am going back in Feb 19

@StJohn Cool! Aonung was my go-to place for birding and swimming on long weekends when I was teaching at Nakhon, Thailand. Now I live six minutes from the beach by motorbike, in Songkhla, so don't need to travel.

@birdingnut fascinated by the language and started learning the alphabet. Uphill battle!

@StJohn Thai makes so much more sense than English; if you can read it you can pronounce it, and vice versa. No tense verbs, articles, capital letters, spaces, or punctuation. If English were that simple, English grammar ad ESL teachers would be out of a job.

@StJohn What's frustrating is the bewilderment of my Thai ESL students when they pronounce an English word correctly according to phonetics, but of course it's wrong.

I use illustrated phonics songs to teach them grammar and pronunciation rules and exceptions, taken from the Sing, Spell, Read, and Write phonics songs, seen on YouTube.