Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - "It's A Small World" Stories

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"It's A Small World" Stories

Have you ever had coincidental or even uncanny moments overseas? These three are my favorites: (1) Husband and I were the only two visitors to the St. Sebastian catacombs on the Appian Way in Rome, and had a priest guide all to ourselves. We were a little uneasy as the tour took on almost a mystical atmosphere, three levels underground, with the priest using his flashlight only to save on the electric lights. The mood was broken, however, when he asked where we were from, and we learned that he had lived two blocks from us in St. Paul, Minnesota in the 1970s while attending undergrad school. (2) Two years ago, I bought a Turkish rug from a store in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. As I was sipping tea, and we were chatting, it turned out that the proprietor's nephew was a doctor in Minneapolis, whom we later found out was the partner of one of our physicians. Anyone have similar stories?

Good topic! I have a story that happened to my best friend. She went over to Europe last March on a school trip, and while browsing in a Swiss departement store, got into the same elevator as her Aunt!! Neither had know the other was going overseas, let alone both to Switzerland!

It was bastille day in Paris.we were waiting for the fireworks in front of the invalides.There were zillions of people.The lady next to me spoke when she heard me speaking english.It turned out she lived in Canada about 20 miles from where we live.

My wife was looking in a glass museum case at the Ming Tombs outside Beijing. A man stood nearby with his back turned. To her, he looked familiar. So she said, "John?" He turned. He was an usher in our wedding...40 years before.

(I'm so happy to see this thread going. I started one months ago and there were about 30 great stories there but it dropped down and I guess it's lost forever. I did print out at one point. Did anyone else? I'd love to get a copy. Please let me know!)

We were at Tivoli Gardens in Italy,admiring the beautiful gardens when I glanced to my right and saw a woman who knew me when I was a toddler. She lived on the same street as we did and I had not seen her in twenty years. She looked the same but I didn't!!!

We were in Tangiers last April on a one day group trip from Spain. The group was having lunch at a "genuine Moroccan restaurant " when a woman was seated at my table by our guide. She reminded me of a friend I hadn't seen in 40 years. It turned out that she was her best friend and the three of us had been in the same home economics class 40 years before.

My parents went to Ireland for two weeks last fall. They were in a gift shop and my father thought that another customer lookes familiar. My father asked the man if he was from our hometown. It ended up that they both go to the same church. My father recognized him from mass. Small world!

Here's another one to the top.

on a trip to the south pacific 12 years ago,we ran into a personal friend in a bookstore in Aukland,one of our customers in Queenstown , and the parents of one of our waitresses in the cook islands,10,000 miles from home....pretty damn small,ain't it?

While living in Belfast, I went to the first night of practice for a volleyball team I was joining. At the practice, we later discovered, were two women--who had never met before--from the same small town in Canada. They grew up 2 blocks from each other, and one was a couple of years ahead of the other in school. They knew each other's family name, but had not known each other growing up.

Used to travel alot on business and was waiting to board a flight at Ohare to London. A woman in the waiting area recognized me from an LA flight the week before (the flight attendant spilled a drink on me). We then ran into her two days later on Portobello Road in London. Either a coincidence or maybe she was just a stalker. LOL

i should write a book on this topic. it is an extremely small world out there and the more traveling you do the more you know about it. i'll just give you a couple of goods one that have happened to me. my grandfather had several brothers & sisters but was not close to them all because their mother died when they were young and they didn't grow up together. but they knew each other and where they were, etc. anyway, growing up i only knew one of his brothers, who had a granddaughter my age so we sometimes played together. when i was around 18/19 years old i was out with some friends one night. one of my friends had a new boyfriend that we were all just getting to know. he had been around for a couple of weeks. we all thought he was great!! good looking, great sense of humor, liked all of us, we liked him, etc. anyway we were sitting at this bar and my distant cousin (granddaddy's brother's grandchild) walked in. greg (the new boyfriend) makes the comment that there is his cousin. to make a long story short, his mother and my grandfather were brother and sister---we were cousins!!! and we had never met. #2-i grew up in a fairly small town in alabama. my high school graduating class had less than 150 people in it. couple of years ago i went on a bicycling vacation in vermont during the fall. our group was staying at a bed & breakfast. we would do our ride in the morning and in the afternoon we would all gather downstairs to watch the world series. we were in middleberry i believe (a small town in vermont). anyway, one afternoon we were watching the game and the local newspaper was lying there. i picked it up and opened it up and on the front page was a picture of a guy that i graduated from high school with, who still lives in my hometown!!! he owns an auction company and they had been there the day before doing an auction in middleberry. #3--couple of years ago i was flying from atlanta to nice, france. we went through brussels and had to change airlines. so we were standing in line at the airport in brussels to get our boarding passes for the next flight and i started talking to the guy in front of me. he also grew up in my hometown, in alabama. happens to me all the time it seems like!!

While vacationing solo in Britain in 1996, I went down for a beer in a small pub in Broad Campden, a village about a mile from Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds. Somehow I ended up in conversation with a young American couple, and we discovered that my uncle had been best friends with the bride's father since high school. They were best men in each other's weddings.

kinda makes you wonder - if we all "spoke up" more - how many more of these magic moments would we have? what if that person sitting next to you on the plane was your Dad's college prof? you wouldn't know unless you struck up a conversation... odd moment, but not while traveling per se: I was visiting a friend in his new house/neighborhood. As I was leaving in the evening his neighbors were putting out the trash and talking. I just happened to overhear one of 'em mention going home to Erie for the weekend. As I am pretty outgoing I stopped and said "oh, wow, Erie, I am from there too. where did you go to school?" He admitted he actually was from a suburb and that he went to Fairview High School. Way back in the day, before my parents went into business for themselves, my Dad taught science and math at that High School - he knew my Dad! neat huh? Beth

We were sitting at an outdoor cafe in Firenze and the couple at the next table were from a smaller city near where I grew up in Texas and my father taught the husband. On another trip my mother was talking with a man and found out he was a coach at the high school where she grew up & Burden, Kansas, is hardly a speck on any map. I have a bunch of "small world" stories but those were the longest shots.

My most amazing type of stories like this are; one night we were in a small town in Germany for a regional fireworks show and afterwards walked around window shopping a bit on dark empty streets. Someone came up behind me and called my name. Turned out to be a German woman who was in a seminar years before with me in California who recognized my voice! Another time we left a restaurant in a medium sized city in France and walked to our car which was just outside the entrance. In the few feet between the restaurant and the car a woman passed us as she walked down the street and she called out to me. Turned out to be another woman I had met 4 years before in the USA. I've had other strange run ins with people I kew but these were the most striking.

I was about 25 and in Puerto Rico with 5 of my girlfriends. We were trying to get to the rum factory via bus and were totally lost. There was a guy standing alone at a bus stop - so we stopped to ask for directions. Turns out he lived in Malden, MA (the same town we were from). We started playing the game "do you know so and so?" Turns out that his parents were the godparents of my little brother Michael. Our families had lost touch 15+ years previously (I think my mother had some argument with his mother). The last time I had seen him was when I was about 12 when we used to attend each others birthday parties.