I’m curious to know how many dopers have run on to an old friend or acquaintance far from home.
Example, I grew up in Missouri and moved to Virginia in 1993. Shortly after I moved to Virginia, I took a day trip up to Washington DC. On the way there, I stopped at a rest area just outside of DC. While washing my hands, I noticed a guy walking in who looked somewhat familiar. I finished and went outside and was looking at the map of the area which was posted. The man I had seen walking into the restroom came back out and I suddenly realized…it was Roy, the man who had lived across the street from my parents house for my entire life. We chatted for about 30 minutes and both were stunned that we happened to run on to each other. He had been visiting his daughter in North Carolina and was driving up to PA to visit an old army buddy before heading back to MO.
I also ran into an old co-worker while at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany.
I’m from Calgary. I was in a teeny town in Peru in the only hostel there, and my SO and I walked from our room chatting in English. A man’s voice behind us asks if we’re Canadian. I turned around and saw a man whom I had seen often first thing in the morning buying coffee where I buy coffee.
Later on in the trip, about 3 weeks later, we stayed at a hostel that hadn’t even opened yet (friend of a friend thing got us a room there). The second night, the host, Ludwig, said that his brother had agreed to let some other friends of a friend say over for a couple of days and they were Canadian, but didn’t know where they were from. When they arrived, and after conversations, one of the girls and I realized we’d had email communications in regards to business (I’m in oil and gas, she works for a regulatory authority we deal with). Two odd coincidences.
I was standing on a subway platform in Paris (France, not Texas!) when I was in college and this guy is kind of moving up behind me and looking at me, and it kind of weirds me out. He comes up and says, “Did you go to Dreher?” Which was my high school. I recognized him finally when I got a really good look at him - he was three years behind me, and I sort of knew his brother. Weird as hell, huh?
ETA - it was also a little distressing, as since high school I’ve tried to make myself so much cooler and prettier and different, and here it didn’t do any good - people can still recognize me from behind in foreign countries.
When I was a freshman in college, I ran into one of my dearest friends at the Denver airport. I was flying back home to Seattle from Des Moines, and he’d gone on a skiing trip in Colorado between travelling from Chicago (where he went to school) and home.
I ran into my cousin in a bar in Aspen, CO. I was chit-chatting with another woman in the bathroom, both of us remarking that we’d heard the band in the Chicago area. Yadda-yadda…I find my cousin suckin’ down brewskis!
My cousin, who is from Jamaica and was attending school in North Dakota, moved to LA searching for acting work. I was visiting my best friend in LA from Boston. We were at Alien Records and my best friend ran into a distant cousin… just before I saw my cousin in the same store!
There was a post about this a couple of weeks ago.
While stationed with the US Navy near Nice, France, I ran into a Mass. K-12 classmate of mine 9 years post-grad while at the Nice RR station.
While checking into a motel in Jasper, British Columbia, after taking trains from Boston across Canada to there, I ran into a friend of mine who was the “mayor” of my Mass. hometown, who, with his wife, had just gotten off a train trip across the USA from Mass. We all rented a car and drove up the Jasper-Banff Highway and visited the Columbia Icefields and Banff. I and my travel companion then continued south to San Francisco and east back across the US and they continued east back across Canada to Mass.
[QUOTE=Ignatz]
There was a post about this a couple of weeks ago.
I was afraid of that. I tried to do a search before posting but couldn’t find anything. My bad.
About a year after law school, I was living near San Diego, CA.
My San Diego law school roommate moved to Palo Alto, CA.
I took a weekend road trip and bumped into him walking down a crowded North Beach sidewalk in San Francisco.
Before law school, I lived in Long beach, CA, and worked at a music store. I later moved to Sacramento. While here, I bumped into a former co-worker of mine at the gym.
Last year, while traveling to SoCal for Christmas, I bumped into this former co-worker’s wife at Ontario Airport (she now lived in Sac with the husband, supra. She was also a former co-worker of mine at the Long Beach music store back in about 1990.
When I was working as a barback in Prague after college, I had a cute coworker from Sweden. Her best friend came to visit her from Sweden, and to my astonishment I already knew her from the states. She was a good friend and drinking buddy from my coed fraternity back at college in Texas, where she’d gone on a student visa.
I was in a small village in Tuscani, Italy with my then wife. We ran into the parents of one of her good friends from college.
When I was frequently traveling back and forth to Asia for work, it wouldn’t be unusual to run into colleagues or former colleagues in various Asian airports. It happened in Tokyo and Singapore more than once.
I ran into one of my best friends from my California elementary school on Kensington High Street in London. She claimed she knew instantly that it was me because I was carrying an umbrella even though it wasn’t raining.
I’ve run into friends from Southern California at the Denver airport, when we were both returning from school-related trips. Connie was coming back from grading AP Math tests, and I was returning from NFL Nationals in Atlanta. We both ended up sitting next to each other on the Denver-Ontario leg.
For both time and distance, my father holds the record. We were eating dinner in Anchorage, Alaska when a man walked across the room and said “You’re Mr. X! I had you for Earth Science in 8th grade in San Bernardino back in 1957!”
For me personally, it was when I met a friend from elementary school 20 years later on a street in Edinburgh.
Grew up in New Jersey, met up with a friend I hadn’t seen in about seven years in London. Granted, we knew each other would be in the UK, so it wasn’t entirely coincidental, but it was still odd that we ended up there at the same time.
I lived in Israel for a couple of years back in the late 80s, and in a pub started chatting up this cute girl…turned out she was from the part of Maryland where I lived 'til I was 7. Then I found out she went to the same school as me. Then I found out that her brother had been my best friend. I hadn’t seen her since she was, like, 5.
And I struck out anyway.
Growing up, every summer was the same – load up the TravelAll and go see the country.
One year, our travels were going to take us through Denver – home of one of my brothers. Another brother of mine (who still lived at home), decided that while he was going to head to Denver too, he was going to hitchhike (why yes, this was the 70’s…why do you ask?).
Three times during our drive we came up on the familiar American flag backpack he carried. My father even graciously stopped and gave him a ride once.
I don’t travel much; the best one I can think of was about four hours from home. I was auditioning at Ithaca College, and I ran into my best friend from 2nd-4th grades in the hotel lobby - she was visiting Cornell.