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It's a small world!

Got on a train going from Salzburg to Venice. Started talking to a young man who was from Brazil and was studying for his PhD at the University of Salzburg. Mentioned to him that my neice has recently married a man from Brazil who ran a Brazilian Jui-Jit-Su school in Moore Oklahoma. The young man on the train ended up being his cousin. Small world!

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13809 posts

Oh, that is SO neat! I love connections like that!

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3940 posts

We were in Ottawa checking out the canals and started talking to a gent from the UK (my husband had a Clarks England tshirt on...Clarks shoes - I used to work at a store that sold them). A few days later, we are in Montreal at a B&B...chatting to a British couple over breakfast who had been in Ottawa a few days before - you guessed it - the VERY SAME man we were talking to in Ottawa...at the same B&B out of how many in Montreal?!

And down in Maine or New Hampshire at a motel and ran into someone from our town who know my husband's dad from his work...

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8091 posts

I was walking down the street in Warnemunde, Germany and ran into my sister and brother in law. Hadn't seen'em in 18 months, and they live about 150 miles from us.
Yes it's a small world.

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419 posts

My sister-in-law ran into her sister-in-law in Waikiki Beach. One lives in Alaska and the other in North Carolina. Their husbands are brothers and the last time the two saw each other was 7 years prior when the brothers' dad remarried. The dad had heard from each son that that they were going to Hawaii and had meant to getting around to telling each that the other was going. 😀

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16027 posts

Many years ago --- I was a college student studying in Germany. I was in Stuttgart, in the evening, looking into one of those display cases they had on the street in the downtown area. On the other side, I recognized a high school friend! We both were amazed. Turns out she was with the Stuttgart Ballet.we had great fun catching up.

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2261 posts

Smaller all the time! We were riding the train from Florence to Vernazza. Transiting the station at La Spezia we ran into one of our sons good buddies. He was doing what we had failed to do-traveling the world at a young age, it was such a pleasure to see him and to enjoy the moment. A passerby offered to take a photo, it's one of our favorites.

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2298 posts

Before my very first trip to Europe with a friend, we found out that our work colleague was also planning to be in London and Paris at the same time. Since we were trying to escape work (and to be honest, him!) we decided to decline his offer to meet for dinner while on vacation. But the fates had other ideas in mind....we ran into him on the street in front of Westminster Abbey.

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10178 posts

My husband and I had just arrived in Rome, after a long trip from the West Coast. Trying to keep moving until our walking tour started, we decided to go to Termini to buy our train tickets in advance for our next destination. We took the metro from our hotel. We were a little nervous about pickpockets after all the warnings. As I was stepping off the train, just in front of my husband, a man grabbed my upper arm. My husband was getting ready to hit him, until the man said my name. It was a former coworker. Small world!

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368 posts

My family loved to travel. When I was just out of the 6th grade we took a family vacation to Club Med in Tahiti. On a day trip around the island, walking down one of the beaches, we ran into my kindergarten teacher who was also on vacation. Of all the places, a beach in Tahiti, many miles from Kensington CA.

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9099 posts

A bunch of years ago walking across the Tower Bridge, a taxi pulled over and the Rabbi of my Synagogue popped out. Also in London at a performance at at the National Theater complex a fellow season ticket holder for the New York Red Bulls soccer team who I sit next also had seats adjacent to mine. And yet again in London I was exiting the old Highbury soccer stadium, and someone yelled out "hey Michael Schneider", turned around and didn't recognize anyone out of the hundreds of other people leaving. To this day I still don't know who that was????

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1541 posts

We took a Caribbean cruise for Christmas 2013 with my sister and her family. Her neighbours turned up on the same ship.

I ran into a colleague at Disney World; although we knew we were both going on the same day it seemed unlikely we'd actually see each other.

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653 posts

I was sitting on a plane at Ben Gurion Airport waiting to fly from Israel to New York. Started talking to the guy next to me. Turns out he was from the same little town I grew up in, went to the same high school and actually grew up on the street that my sister currently lives on. Definitely a small world!

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8293 posts

I think I have told this before but anyway .........

We were in the gift shop of a hotel in Shiraz, Iran. Another customer heard us speaking English and asked where we were from. He was a doctor who had been brought up and educated in Montreal, having lived a few blocks away from where I live now. What are the odds?

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2252 posts

I traveled with a couple on a RS tour a couple of years ago that were from the same tiny town in rural Ohio as my son-in-law. They knew his folks. Yes, it truly is.........

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5 posts

A few years ago, I was at Stonhenge during spring break from school. An gentleman and his daughter wanted me to take a picture of them which I applied agree to. Later on when I was waiting for the bus, they walked past me and she went to the restroom, so he and I struck up a conversation. They were also on spring break.

He was from Australia but she was working for a US Company at a Navel Base in the USA. He was a history biff and had spent a month or so traveling the east coast visiting Civil War Battlefields. I told him the area around Fredericksburg has quite a bunch around and he said he knew because his daughter was attending the College in Fredericksburg. It was the same college I was attending and she was 1 year ahead of me. As conversation continued, the base she worked at and lived by was in the same little town I live in. (Population 1500 or so). There was only about 100 people at Stonehenge at that time since it was about 40 and windy. quite chilly.

3500 miles at a site with 100 people and someone who lives in my small community was there.