Guild Wars 2

So I bought GW2 last night and have downloaded it overnight, my friend also bought it and has selected a world already somewhere in the Europe section.
I have no idea what he selected until we meet today in real life but until then I really want to try out this game.
So is there a way to check what worlds other players are linked too?
Or with the 7 day swap, is this free and if you do are you characters deleted?

As Yargesh said, if you delete your characters you can transfer for free. There is then a 7 day cooldown in which you can’t transfer again.

Transferring servers
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Server
“The transfer fee is only charged if you have characters on your account; in other words, if your account has no characters or you delete all existing characters first, you will be prompted to select a new home world after creating a new character, free of charge.

To transfer to a different world, go to the character selection screen (using F12 or when you first logon) and select the desired world; you will be logged out while the game makes these changes, which might take 5-30 minutes. You can transfer once every seven days at a cost determined by the destination server population and whether or not you have characters".

The reason for the 7 day period is because of WvW (world vs world), the big PvP/PvE map. People were abusing free, no cooldown transfers at the start of the game to spy on enemy servers. Because of complaints about this, they put in the cooldown period (each matchup lasts one week so by the time a player can play in WvW again, the matchup is over).

If you friend somebody and they are online, when you are in character select and look at all the servers, it will show you which friends are online and which server they are on.

If you are playing, you can be informed when he logs on. Friend him then go to chat options (top of each chat section such as map chat). Enable game messages. In addition to telling you stuff you don’t care about, when he logs in it will say on that chat, display name.1234 is online, where display name.1234 is his name like sirjosh.9561 is yours.

can delete characters and transfer for free