The ship from Australia to England on my first trip overseas pulled up at Southampton, and a bus (coach!) took us to London. Stepping down from the bus in Earl's Court, I looked to see I wasn't going to bump into any pedestrian - and the pedestrian I might have bumped into was an old friend from my secondary school. We used to hang out together. I was a boarder and he a day-pupil who invited me to his home on some Sundays. Then we lost touch and hadn't seen each other for six or seven years. That was an amazing small-world experience for us both.
Just as a follow-up... We hung around together in London that winter, then went our separate ways. I bought a car in Germany and drove around Britain by myself, then headed east to Oktoberfest in Munich and south to Greece. I picked up a girl in a hostel there and we drove to Ankara where we parked the car while we hitch-hiked east through Turkey to Iran. Dragged out of a shop in Isfahan to meet another pair of backpackers, we found my friend Graham and a Japanese companion, headed for Japan. (I mentioned the meeting in an old blog-post, if anybody is interested. The link is at http://barlowscayman.blogspot.com/2012/ … uwait.html )
So, there you go: two stories for the price of one - my contribution to this new thread. Since we're all expats here, there must be others who have had similar experiences. Could we hear about them, please?
Small World
When we lived in Vila in the New Hebrides (now Port Vila, Vanuatu) in the South Pacific, in the '70s, my wife had a job meeting people off the planes each day and trying to sell them bus tours. One day a pair of backpackers asked her if she could recommend a cheap place to stay. She took pity on them and invited them home to our little apartment. While chatting, she and the girl realised that they had been at the same church-camp outside Melbourne at the age of 15. Small world!
When I arrived home from work I was introduced to the pair, and the Canadian boyfriend's name rang a faint bell with me. Had we met somewhere along the road in Europe? Indeed we had. He was part of a group from the Youth Hostel in Thessaloniki (Greece) nine years before, that decided to go to the local cinema to watch "Zorba the Greek". An even smaller world! (One of the Australian girls in the group hitched a ride with me next morning, and we travelled together for several months through the Middle East and parts of the Soviet Empire. And married in Toronto a couple of years later.)
In 1980 I was recruited to work on road construction on the worlds largest gold project at the time in Papua New Guinea. Flew to up to site in a small plane, stepped off and waited for my luggage.
Got a tap on the shoulder and it was a guy I knew from my old school in NZ !! He was a qualified electrician working on camp construction.
The ease of travel and peoples desire to do so make the world a smaller place.
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