I have been all over the world but the coolest friends I have ever met was when I was in Taiwan and Korea...where did you meet your coolest friends? It has been over 15 years since I have met friends from my travels and we still keep in touch.
Some of the coolest people we've met traveling were Tony and Jessica in Tahiti, on our honeymoon. We saw them in passing a few times but when we were on a boat, we started to chat it up. We exchanged wedding stories...we had all come off a "high" from only days before, in fact, I believe we all got married on the same day.
As we started talking about how our cousin John DJ'd after our wedding at an after-party, we used the word "spinning" instead of "dj'ing" and they caught on to that immediately, asking us what kind of music we listened to. We admitted to loving dance music and found out that they did to...at that moment, a friendship was born.
We hung out with this amazing, cool couple for the next few days - they let us hang out in their sweet bungalow at the Intercontinental Thalasso, the most gorgeous and amazing resort ever. That budding friendship carries on to this day. Love them!
I always make it a point to try and meet people whenever I travel. It makes the entire experience much more rich and memorable. Other than our honeymoon, I met this really cool person while we were in Japan. We still email back and forth. The best thing is that you get to spend time doing things that typical tourists would have missed all together.