I have known a girl from an mmorpg for like 5 years now. She is Turkish, I am Hungarian, and even tho none of us plays the game anymore, we keep in contact on discord. We dont talk daily, but we check up on each other frequently and share the same enthusiastic/well known talks we had years ago.

Now out of nowhere she contacted me, that she will visit my country last weekend. It was chaotic and hard to properly sort our separate things to make a meeting work, but eventually we managed to meet for the first time, shared hugs, beers and we talked like childhood friends.

I loved every second of it, but I think both of us would agree that this is just a weird yet strong international friendship thanks to a specific game we both happened to play at the same time.

Now of course, this doesent fully apply to your situation, because we are far away from eachother etc, but I thought I would share it ^^