I have this one former colleague that I’ve run into in a bar in Afghanistan, a bookstore in Alexandria, Virginia; and a hotel lobby in the Philippines. To be fair, we both work in international development so the run in in Afghanistan wasn’t that far of a stretch, but the other two were just weird.
Someone I knew vaguely in grade school in Northern California spotted me on the National Mall (they were there as part of an event, I was there as a tourist)
While on a family vacation, my wife and I met one of my wife’s coworkers and his wife (and their entire tour group) in a restaurant/pub in Galway. It was nice, but awkward, and we soon paid our check and discreetly left.
I was doing a semester abroad in Budapest (I went to college in Chicago), and a friend of mine from college was doing study abroad in Vienna. I took a weekend trip to Vienna (only 3 hours by train), and saw him when we both happened to be trying to see the Vienna Boys Choir.
I saw an acquaintance from my american uni when I was vacationing in Prague. I was on a tram and he was on the side of the road. We made eye contact and managed to wave before I zoomed by. I didn’t see him again until we both got back to campus this fall.
I went to Italy several years ago. I was in Florence, admiring the Baptistry doors, when I ran into a guy who had previously been my best friend.
ran into someone in Lhasa that I knew in college, and she was high school best buddies with my step sister.
ran into dozens of people in Hong Kong
didn’t run into but through a very wierd set of coincidences met up with a guy I knew in pre-school in northern Idaho 2 days after his liver transplant.
My friend and I’s motorcycle broke down after a brief tampering by a local, out at a series of sand dunes in Vietnam. Turns out the tamperer’s plan was to screw up the bike so it would die, then come by and offer his help in exchange for a small fee.
About 10 minutes after standing at the side of this sand dune wondering what the hell we were going to do to get back into town (over an hour ride on a fairly low-traffic road), a motorcycle whizzed past us and someone called out my name. Turns out two of my friends had started dating and were backpacking Vietnam at the same time, and just so happened to be on their way to the same sand dunes as us.
I’m from Canada, and at the time I thought it was pretty spectacular to run into someone from my home town half way across the world in what is really a desert that almost no one visits. Plus we didn’t have to pay the jackass who tried to scam us…
I went to high school in Tokyo for a couple years. While there, I met a brother-sister pair whose father worked with, and was a good friend of, my father. We hung out now and then, the last time being in Hong Kong when the three of us sat in a bar all night in about 1988.
Fast forward to 1992. I’m in college in Athens, Georgia, in a bar downtown called (IIRC) the Full Moon Pub. There’s music, and one of my drinking buddies points to some guy out on the dance floor and says, “Man, that guy’s a wild dancer!”
Sure enough, it’s my buddy from Tokyo/Hong Kong.
I ran into someone I knew from Arizona at a Jerusalem hotel bar.
ETA: East Jerusalem, a highly Muslim area, and we were both Jewish.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I ran into my Spanish teacher (a Chilean living in Montreal) in Madrid.
In the early '70s I ran into a guy I’d had a terrific crush on in high school (in the late '60s) in Frankfurt at a Grateful Dead concert.
Ran into the Canadian ex-boyfriend of a college roommate in the Luxembourg train station about five years after I’d known him.
Ran into a college acquaintance in Rome, but this was just the year after we graduated so not too surprising. What was surprising, in college we didn’t much like each other, but we became good buddies in Rome and hung out together for a couple of days and kept in touch for a few years after that.
Most time: About five years ago I had new next-door neighbors (in Denver) and they had a party. A couple of people going to the party came to my house instead, walked in the front door–and one of the guys used to come to my town (Santa Ana) in summers to stay with his grandparents, who lived two doors down from us. The weird thing was, obviously after 40-some years we looked different. Yet we both realized we knew each other somehow. It took a bit of talking to figure out how.
Ran into a (4th to 12th grades) classmate while visiting New York City. We’re from a small town in Spain.
Moved to Miami. After three years there, found out a long-lost cousin of Dad’s was living 25 minutes from me and met with her family a few times (that Thanksgiving dinner was yummy indeed).
And Zsofia, what Darryl said.
We moved half way round the world. Really, you can’t get too much further away from where I was born. I grew up in a paper mill town in NZ of about 10000 people, and we live in a village in the UK of about 10000 people. You wouldn’t visit Kawerau unless you really wanted to or had to - it’s off the beaten track and has no redeeming features whatsoever.
Our doctor in the UK is from NZ and had employed my mother-in-law - my wife had met her in NZ.
Someone from our church had travelled to NZ and worked at the papermill in the town I grew up in - we knew names in common and could well have met, but I wasn’t that old at the time.
We went to a BBQ with friends - they had invited their neighbours. He was a twin, his brother also lived and worked in the town I grew up in. I certainly knew the brothers name as someone who worked at the mill.
Small world - but odds are funny things.
Si
My hubby and I ran into one of his workmates (who sits about six feet from him) twice by accident in Los Angeles on our honeymoon - once at Disneyland and the next day at Universal Studios. That was very odd.
We were living in Prague, and while on holiday in rural Turkey, ran into friends we knew from living in Tbilisi, Georgia.
When I used to live in Nevada I was on holiday in Dubai and ran into a fellow I had met in Nevada a few weeks earlier.
Met a guy in the LA Airport and saw him again two weeks later getting off an elevator in Yerevan, Armenia.
In 2001, a guy who worked closely with my officemate used to pop into our office once or twice a day. This was in the D.C. area.
That November, my wife and I were in the Oahu airport, in the line to check in for the Maui puddle-jumper. We struck up a conversation with the couple in front of us. The husband was my officemate’s co-worker’s brother.
I ran into someone I knew when I was visiting Prague.
Here’s kind of a funny one. . .my wife and I are going to Cape Town in October. We bought our plane tickets, and then we found out that our neighbor is also going to Cape Town in October. A pretty big coincidence.
Turns out, we’re on the same flight from J-Burg to C-Town. We share a wall in Baltimore.
Texas.
I live in the northeast (New Jersey and Boston)
Happened to me three times. Twice in Dakllas/Ft. Worth airport, although one time we were getting on the same plane, and I’m not sure it ought to count.
The other time I met someone I used to work with on the Riverwalk in San Antonio.
I mean, I’m no expert, but I don’t think it’s so spectacularly unusual that one could pick it out from the swirling mass of all the world’s humanity! Perhaps he was a connoisseur.