Share your "It's a small world" story
 

I'll start it off...
Was in Southern Ca. on a mini vacation last week, stuck in a traffic jam in downtown Hollywood. Car in front of us gets hit by another car, driver hops out. Just happened to be one of our table mates from a cruise we had taken a few years ago. What are the odds??

I hire a car service for airport transportation years ago. The driver tells me he needs to pick up someone important for a ride to the same airport. As it turned out, that someone was a very nice person I met in a bar in Manhattan awhile back. We even ended up together on the same flight to Miami and sat together. Small world. :-)

I travelled from Oz to La for a six week Top Deck tour of USA. One night we stayed at an Indian Reservation which I think was in Nth Dakota. WE went to a bar on the reservation and the guy behind the bar was a school friend of mine !

We were going to drive the Alaska Highway. The starting point is Dawson Creek, British Columbia. We spent the night in a campground next to a nice couple. We went up to Fairbanks and then down to Denali and ended up a little over a week later camping next to them again. We toured around Alaska and then headed back down the Alaska Highway and spend the night again in Dawson Creek. While we didn't get the campsite next to this same couple we did see them there again.

Mind you, we are taking about 4,000 to 5,000 miles and about 4 weeks time and we didn't know the others plans.

Utahtea

Lived in SF Bay Area at the time. Took the family to NYC. Staying in Times Square and one afternoon begin walking to Letterman show on typically crowded streets and literally run into a women and her kids my wife did PTA stuff with. What are the odds....

second one was 2 months ago. I fo to Ireland alot for business. Took my wife this last trip and we did some touristing. Companies factory is in villiage of 7,000 people in Cork. I always stay at a superb B&B there. We walk in after dinner to the small "lobby" area where there is a fireplace and sofas and sitting there with his wife is a guy I worked with 5 years ago. He was on vacation with his kids, and heard this was a good place to stay on his way up north.

Not a US sighting but what the he"..walking through Piazza San Marco in Venice in the midst of an acqua alta. I hear a voice that sounds so familiar and happen upon a woman I used to buy flowers from in SF. She was sitting outside the Florian waiting for the folood waters to recede. She was in Venice for a day as a port o call on a cruise.

This happened when I went to Ao Nang near Krabi last year. One evening when we went out to eat a guy came over to me and asked me if he could ask me a question. I said ?sure? and then he started talking Norwegian and he asked me if I was Norwegian. I confirmed this and then he asked me if my name was Gard. This was really surprising and I said yes once again. It turned out that he had been on my homepage and he had seen pictures and he recognized me from that. That is quite amazing if you ask me. I travel half around the world and then I get recognized because one guy has been on my homepage. Quite amazing.

Regards
Gard
Stavanger, Norway
www.gardkarlsen.com

I was waiting for the KC hotel restaurant to open for breakfast. Someone who had traveled via bus was just arriving and did not like the looks of the hotel. She asked us if we liked it. We were on a budget and not fussy. She inspected her room and declared it too dirty. Traveling by bus had turned out not to be a good idea for her, she was overtired and grumpy. A few years later, she moved to NH and we ran into each other again.

story #2: Arriving at a salmon restaurant in Tok, someone noted our NH license plates. Not only were they also from NH, but he was the big brother of someone I knew.

i went from norway to bangkok. i had been there for 3 days, and next night i went out to get something to eat, and when i was walking back to the hotel a girl pick me on the shoulder and say:long time no see, and it was my neighbour who i had not seen for years. she was just that night in thailand,cause she was leaving the next day for bali. extremly small world!!!!!!!!!!!!

Both of my stories are from a small, obscure island in the Bahamas: Elbow Cay.

On a visit back in 1997, my husband and I would walk down the road from the inn at which we were staying to a beach, and we'd admire a house under construction, on a bluff overlooking the beach and ocean. When I returned to the office, I dove right into work with a new client, who'd engaged my firm while I was away. Over the course of the engagement, I learned the client often frequented an obscure island in the Bahamas and was building a house there. You guessed it: it was the house we looked at every day during our visit.

In 2000, my husband and I chartered a sailboat in the Bahamas. One day, in an anchorage in Elbow Cay, we saw a sailboat of the same make as the one we'd just bought at home, home-ported in our home state, though we never got a chance to visit with the owners. Seeing this boat fueled our own dreams of taking a year or more off and sailing the islands on our identical boat. Once we got home, we began researching the possibility, and in so doing, found the website of a young couple who had done just that. They were the owners of the boat we saw in Elbow Cay! (It gets better...). I decided to e-mail them, and it turned out that they had returned to the U.S. and were now living IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD, and were members of the same sailing club we'd just joined. We decided to meet up with them, and have since become friends with the wife (the husband moved on).

London 1.987. Friends of mine, a couple, went to London for holiday. A friend's daughter was living there and they told their parents that they would call her for having a drink, so the father wrote the phone number in a matches box of the restaurant he owned.
While in a London subway, when opening the matches box to see the phone number in order to call her, a young lady suddenly says . . . hey ! this is from my father's restaurant in Mallorca . . !It was her . . .

About 1991-92, the print shop I am part-owner of printed a political journal called The Next Progressive, edited by a pleasant young man named Eric Liu. After Bill Clinton was elected, Eric wrote speeches for a while for the Clinton State Department. Later, Liu wrote the book Accidental Asian. In 1995, when my wife served the EPA for 4 months assignment in Seattle, I visited her. The night I was to go to the airport, the Seattle electric trolley broke down so we, and about 100 other people were trying to flag a taxi. One of those was Eric Liu. However, Liu and we were in such a panic to get a taxi, I never acknowledged Liu. However, flagging down a taxi so I could make my plane was more important.

Fifteen years ago I decided on a vacation to Aruba I was going to wear shorts for the first time as I was self concious of my weight. At the Stone Bridge I heard someone call my name and there wasn't anyplace to hide...a friend was there on her honeymoon...lol On a visit to her vacation home recently there is a picture of the Stone Bridge....and me on it as a dot..lol....

I had called on a customer and we were discussing our days in the Navy. He was a former Sea-Bee and I a destroyer man. When he told me his father had also served on a destroyer I offered him a recent copy of the Tin Can Sailors newsletter I had in the car to give his dad. When he and his folks were looking through it later on they were surprised to find not only a picture of his father's ship, but a picture of his father and some others standing outside CIC.

In March of 1953 while patroling the east coast of Korea, the destroyer I was on, (USS Trathen DD-530) located and destroyed an enemy supply train. The next day while my father was riding to work on the LIRR, the man next to him who was reading the NY Times commented that one of our destroyers operating in Korea had destroyed an enemy train. "Which one" my father asked, "my son is on one over there." It was the Trathen and I still have the article.

This happens to us all the time on our out-west road trips! DH is a teacher/coach, seems to know everyone, (football is HUGE in the midwest) so we run into acquaintances literally everywhere. Places that come to mind: Yosemite, Redwoods Nat'l Park, Seattle, San Francisco, Scottsdale & Saquarro Nat'l Park and Disney World.

Just two weeks ago at Disneyland, we returned to our motel to find a message from a salesman at the dealership where we lease our vehicles. He and his family flew to Anaheim & were staying in the same place; he couldn't believe we'd drive the 3000 miles there, so he had the dealer check out our plates!

I was in week 3 of a 4 week stay in London recently, and attended a charity sale at a local church (St. Johns). The man in charge was a charming older gentleman who encouraged me to attend the funtion. I ended up buying two book, a hat and other odds and ends. Later that day my husband and I were at the National Gallery and I was approached by a guard and the gallery. It was the same gentleman from the charity sale. He asked me how I enjoyed my purchases and how I enjoyed the museum. It was strange having someone come up to you and talk to you after 3 weeks of being anonymous.

Decades ago, while I was in college in Phila., I was taking a daytrip up to Manhattan to the Met. Museum for a art paper. Despite my best intentions of getting back to Penn Station before rush hour, I ran late and found myself packed into the crosstown shuttle at just about 5:15 pm. As the car started and people were shoved around, the crowd in front of where I was sitting parted and directly across from me was a very dear cousin whom I hadn't seen in 5 years and wasn't even sure what city he now lived in! Astonished, we made our way through the crowd to each other and hurriedly exchanged contact information, but I had to wait until the end of the semester to go back up to NYC to see him.

I kept thinking, what were the odds, given requirement that we be exactly opposite each other on the exact same car of the exact same shuttle on the exact same day at the exact same moment, in a city of millions of commuters on the one day I was in the city.

We were in Montreal on vacation eating at one of those little outdoor cafe's in the old city and I look at the restaurant next to us which also has an outdoor cafe and who is there but someone I went to high school and college with. We are both from New Jersey. Weird!

Everywhere we go, it seems my husband runs into a client. That is not so interesting..but can I tell my son's small world story?
When he got out of college he drove to Seattle with a friend.Met friends new roommates, flew back home after a while.
8 years later-my son lives in Japan, starts work with a new Studio. Goes to a co-workers party, runs into one of those roommates from Seattle, who now lives and works in Japan!

My parents and I emigrated to the States from Austria in 1952. We have a photo album of black and white photos taken of us standing in front of the train just before our trip. Eventually, we ended up in Detroit and made the acquaintance of a nice Austrian family, who had also recently emigrated, and with whom we are still good frieds. My mother was showing them our old photos from 1952 and their family was in the window of the train directly behind where we were getting our photo taken.

This is a great thread! I have two:

In 2000 when I went to Italy, some friends of mine were also going to Italy, but our itineraries didn't match up so we knew we weren't going to see each other over there. Fastforward to San Marco Piazza in Venice, my aunt and I drinking a bottle of wine outside listening to the band and people watching, and who walks by but my friends! Their plans had changed, but they had no way to contact me, so it was just a cool coincidence.

I grew up on Long Island, left for college after high school in 1987, and moved to DC in 1999. I walk into a bar with some coworkers, and the bartender is a woman I went to high school with! I now see her about once a month at the bar.

Have a great Friday everyone! :) ((B))

Karen

I was in Rome and ran into an old friend from college back in NY.

I think this qualifies. It's a bit of a shaggy dog.

A long time ago I'm reading a newpaper article about what 6th graders do during summer break. The child interviewed shares my name: first, middle and last. It's a pretty unusual name.

A year later I call to make an appointment for a hair cut. I'm put on hold briefly and then informed by the shop owner that I must be a crank because the child bearing that name is forever banned from the shop for terrorizing them with her bratty hissy fits. I get the same treatment later that year when I try to get a booking at a bistro near that salon.

A few years pass. Out of nowhere my parents (who live in the same city) and I begin receiving phone calls all hours of the day & night from the brothers of a certain fraternity at UVA where my namesake was well known for the variation and frequency of sexual acts she was willing to perform. The bro's were just calling to say hey since my name double had been expelled for performing some of those acts in public.

A couple of years later the calls from the collection agencies start. Car, furniture, clothes, gym membership. The best was a 3 am call from the Fairfax County police asking what was I thinking when I abandoned my 1992 Ford Escort in the middle of the Beltway near the Braddock Rd. exit.

Fortunately we were preparing to leave the area. No more calls.

A year ago I am bumped from a flight leaving Kansas City. I'm put on standby for another flight out and when my name is called, two of us show up at the gate. I got the seat.

My family was waiting in line at the Canadian border at Victoria, when someone behind us asked where we were from (Our VERY Southern accent gave us away!). I replied "Oh a very small town in Alabama." Then a couple in front of us turned around and asked just where in Alabama....they were from another small town just 12 miles down the road! Weird!

Some friends and I drove from Atlanta down to New Orleans for a long weekend. On the way back to Atlanta, we stopped in Mobile, AL to eat lunch at a Morrisons Cafeteria. After eating, we got back in the car and were merging onto I-65 N to continue on towards Atlanta. Someone in the car said: "Look at those people in that van waving at us". I looked and it was my Aunt, Uncle and cousins from Birmingham. We had entered the interstate at the exact same moment that they were passing by... one minute earlier or one minute later, we would have not seen each other.

In Atlanta (actually Tucker, Ga) during lunch at a Wendys Hamburger joint on a weekday, I was sitting there eating and looked up and a friend from High School in Alabama walked in. They had chosen this particular restaurant by chance. We hadn't seen each other since graduation 15 years earlier.

Back in the summer of '76 I was camping for a weekend on the CA coast (I was from Syracsue NY and working out there for the summer during my college years). I was cruising up Highway 1 in the Big Sur area and picked up a hitchhiker who was not particularly motivated about getting a ride (he was sitting against his backpack absorbed in a book with a sign next to home that said ("San Francisco or bust"). As it turns out.... he had been classmates and friends with one of my cousins in Syracuse and we knew a bunch of people in common.

When I was a freshman in college, I was on a road trip with 2 male friends. I stayed the first night in a girls' dorm room at SMU in Dallas; there was a bed available because one of the roommates was out of town. I noticed that a person in a couple of photos tacked on a bulletin board looked familiar. I was told that she was the out of town roommate. It turned out that I ended up sleeping in the bed of one of my best friends from junior high. I never saw her on that trip, just left her a note.

Another time, my husband and I met a nice couple in a campground in Austria. We taked for about an hour at the campground pub. A week later, we met the same people walking down a road in Switzerland.

Every year, I go to a convention related to my work. About 20,000 people attend. One year, a week before the convention, I had a phone conversation with an elderly colleague in another town; I had never met him face to face, but had a picture in my mind of what he must look like. The first day of the convention, I saw someone in the crowd that I just knew had to be him. Sure enough, it was.

obxgirl, what a great story -- I have a slightly unusual name since I married (but apparently not unusual enough) and have had to deal with calls and emails from people wanting to rent a resort cottage from a realtor with same name in another state, as well as a rather pissy person who refused to return or forward obviously misdirected mail, even though I always did that for her. I phoned her once and she told me she had the name first (she actually didn't, but how is it even relevant?) and it was tough noogies for me!!

I'm SOOO glad you got the seat. Did you exchange any conversation w/doppelfraulein? What did she look like? Did she have any idea you existed before that day?

Paid too much to get into the park itself and then waited in line too long at the actual ride.

We got on the boat next to a foul-smelling woman from Eastern Europe. The ride began and we went through the various regions of the world with small animated statues of children singing an annoying song that, to this day, I can't get out of my head.

However, by the end of the ride I was feeling 2 ways
1) A glow of pax humana. The smelly European lady and I exchanged hugs since we were from the same small world after all
2) I don't know if it was the hug or the seasickness from the boat, but I felt slightly nauseated. I threw up and we went on to the Haunted Castle

Thanks Casssandra. As to what she looked like, my husband's expression "rode hard and put up wet" comes to mind. Dim or maybe just hungover. I didn't speak to her for fear of reigniting the cycle of eveil!

As young newlyweds, my parents immegrated to the USA from Germany(1959). Fast forward to 1979. They take their four young children to Disneyworld for vacation. In the hotel the family takes the elevator down to the lobby. Door opens and there is a woman who was a classmate of my father in elementary school in Germany. He hadn't seen her in decades but said she looked exactly the same!

I hiked to the top of Mt. Pilatus near Luzern< Switzerland (where I live) last summer and at the top was my ex from my days living in Alaska, whom I haven't seen in over 7 years.

About a year ago we were at the Hotel Del Coronado having drinks with family. All of a sudden a couple walks by and my husband jumps up out of his seat and the other man gets all excited also...they were fraternity brothers and have not seen each other in 14 years. So they join us for a while, and we find out they live not too far from us near Seattle. The next evening we are at the airport waiting to fly home and my brother bumps into the wife...turned out we were on the same flight home to Seattle:)

A month before I left on a high school trip through France for two weeks, a friend of my brother left with a backpack and a Eurail pass to wander Europe. We joked that we "might see each other". He had no specifics to my itinerary; while walking from my hotel to the beach in Nice with a group of friends we cross each other on the sidewalk. I didn't see him, but he loudly yelled out my name in disbelief! We had dinner that night and he introduced me to other friends he made on the way. How the heck does that happen?

We are from western Pa and were vacationing in Ocean City, Md one time back when I was a teenager. We ran into my cousin from back home and couldn't understand why she was less than thrilled to see us. Here when we told my aunt we had run into her daughter, we found out why. She was supposed to be in Canada with a friend's family. They had lied to each others parents and taken their own trip. Busted!

In San Francisco many years ago, when anyone with or without a ticket could go through airport metal detectors, the fellow in front of me sounded the alarm. When he turned around, I was astonished to see a fellow student I had dated from nursing school in Michigan. He was on his way back from his honeymoon with his wife who was also in the class. It had only been 2 years since we had graduated so we had a lot to say to each other and started to hold up the line!

My first time in Florence - back around '96 or so. We're eating in a small restaurant near our hotel - picked it at random.

As we sit quietly enjoying our wine and waiting for our food we hear other Americans talking - you know how hungry you can sometimes get for your own language.

Table 1 talks to table 2 as we eavesdrop. They start chatting away and it turns out that both tables of people are from San Francisco - as were we.

The whole blooming place was filled with unrelated people all from the same city.

My daughter is from Wisconsin. While visiting Xi-an (China) she ran into a friend who is from Boston.

We were planning a trip to Maui and one of the guys at work told me his two daughters and a fiance lived there and gave us phone numbers to give them a call. When we arrived in Maui one of the first things we did was stop to rent snorkel gear. We're all laughing and joking around and the guy working at the store jokes about us sounding like we're from Texas and says his fiance is from Texas - do you know her? Of course, he was just joking because how many times do people hear where you are from and ask if you know so and so. This time it paid off because it was the fiance. Small world.

1969 Working in small electronics development lab where we had a young Tech. who spent lunch hour on phone to girl-friend.

1992 Check-in line at Algiers airport, see him about four people in front of me, instant recognition by both of us ! Yes, he married her !