It's a very small world...

pottssteve

Apropos of nothing,
There's a banner advert on the Bikeradar website for a company called Howies. I had never heard of them so I clicked on it. Turns out they sell clothing. However, they are based in West Wales, and when I left uni I lived and worked for a year or so just down the road from their office. That was 23 years ago. :shock:
So I followed a couple of links to see where their stuff is made as they are very upfront about their clothing being produced ethically. Three of their manufacturers are in Hong Kong - just down the road from where I work now.....

Small world...

me-109

I went to work in Kuwait some years ago. One of the engineers there knew my mother as they used to work in the same office back home.



And for the smart Alecs ..... no, I was already in my teens! :P

pottssteve

For my 18th birthday my parents gave me a card (amongst other things).

My auntie gave me the same card.

We lived in Manchester and my auntie lived in Canada

RideOnTime

When I was holidaying in Brittany last summer the people next to us on the campsite came from England as well.

MountainMonster

I was walking around in our town back in Austria when I was on holiday last summer( a small town not known for anything really) only to be baffled to see a friend of mine and his wife walking around the city centre. They we're on a road trip to Greece, and had stopped in the town to refuel and get food and other supplies for the last hours of the journey.

What a random coincidence. I've had a few of these types of events happen, including one in Paris where my ex-girlfriend was having dinner at the same restaurant I had booked my wife and I at. It can get kind of scary.

fatsmoker

I got on the tube a year ago and bumped into a guy I'd worked with 10 years earlier in Russia. Weird

CHRISNOIR

For three years on the trot in the late 1990s me and some of the guys I worked with took a bit of a lads holiday each summer. Every year we bumped into people from one of the other departments. Admittedly we worked at the CIS which was pretty big but hey...

peat

I was backpacking around China and in one town was sharing a hostel dorm with a guy who it turned out went to the same school as my university housemate at the time. Pretty tenuous.

I also recently bumped into a couple from Abergavenny in a pub in Oxford, who I had originally met while mountain biking around southern Morocco.

pottssteve

Here's another one -
About 5 years ago I was on a trip with some students. We were on a tiny island near Clearwater Bay, HK. The trip was guided by a company employed by the school to teach the kids outdoor skills etc. One of the instructors was a guy in his 60's, just coming up to retirement. He was from Manchester, and it transpired that his mother lived in the house next to ours in North Manchester during the 1980's. He had often stayed with her for long periods of time so we had been neighbours, 10,000km away, 30 years before......

Wheelspinner

On holiday as a student in Europe, sitting in a near empty train mid winter heading up to Grindelwald in Switzerland, got talking to the only other passenger in the carriage. Turned out he was from my home town in Australia, had lived less than 500m from me at one point (although we'd never met), and was enrolled in the same Uni course as me to start the following year.

Another time, I'd been reviewing contract proposals for a major supply deal with an airline, and had held a meeting with their Account Manager in Sydney. A week later, I was in London for a conference, had an afternoon off and walked into a coffee shop in Soho... sat at a table next to that Account Manager.