What are your, "What a small world!" moments?

[Chanel05]

I moved a 130 miles away from my home town 10 years ago. I walked into my new teaching job on 1st September. I was introduced to all the staff and one of the staff members said I had an unusual surname but one he had heard before. It turns out, my new colleague had been in my brother's year at our secondary school all those miles away! We chatted about teachers we'd had ourselves and what a coincidence it was.

What are your moments?

After having DS2, I got chatting to the woman in the next bed on the post-natal ward. She'd also had a boy born the same day.

A year later, we'd moved to another town a couple of hundred miles away and I was going back to work and DS was going to a nursery. His nursery manager turned out to be that same woman.

Another 3 years after that, we'd returned back to the city I'd given birth in. Took DS for his first day at school and the same woman and her DS were also there for his first day at school. The family moved away again when the boys were 8. Last September, the boys ended up at the same university!

A few years ago we went for a break to Holland to see the flower fields. While driving back to our hotel I spotted a huge field of flowers with no fence. We stopped and carefully made our way into the flowers to take some ‘arty’ photos.
As we were leaving a man (who looked strangely familiar) appeared from no where and said hello, he was the owner of the field.
We apologised for trespassing, and assured him that no flowers were damaged. We said that we were on a visit from the U.K.
He smiled and said that means we are tourists, and tourists should have a souvenir. He then gave us a flower.
After we got back in the car we realised that the flower guy was the Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, who played opposite Harrison Ford in the original film “Blade Runner”. Glad he was a really nice guy and nothing like Roy Batty!

Recently found that a guy I went to school Witt moved 150myards around the corner from me at our old house which was 70 miles away from where we grew up. The brother of one of our classmates had taught at the local school and another girl from school who was and is a really timid friend of mine lived a few mins drive awa, our DD’s went to the same school.

My neighbour is from the same country as my Mum was from . Our grandparents were from the same suburb of a big city, she visited the same small town over there that my Mum grew up in every year for holiday and I did too amd she had worked about 10 miles from there for a bit.

Another guy I went to school with had the same birthday as me and his Dad was the same nationality as my Mum. We were both living in the same city about 40 miles from home at the same time at one point which I knew as I pretty much literally bumped into him in the swimming pool. He has moved to a village we looked at moving too just outside our home town and is currently a few miles down the road as we have moved back and I fully expect to bump into him again at some point as I see from FB he comes here sometimes.

Chatting to a colleague at work it came to light that her DM lives in the same bungalow my GM lived in all her life and was sold when she died.
And not particularly local to us.

My non religious GM visited the cathedral of St Michael on a holiday abroad. We later realised this was the same day my DF died unexpectedly back home. His name was Michael.

We were driving through a small Greek town and stopped at traffic lights. There, sat by a tiny roadside cafe down a side street was the primary school secretary.

Sat on my bed in postnatal with newborn DS, I had to take a work call for my husband. Was recounting this to a group of friends and one of the women said, I remember that! Turns out she was in the bed next to me although her son was born 2 days before mine.

Excellent!

A little convoluted but a former colleague of mine emigrated to Canada a few years back. One day, years later, she posted a picture on FB of her at a bbq with her new next door neighbour & his other guests. Her new next door neighbour is my brother's ex-girlfriend's brother (ex was in the picture).

As a second generation Irish person living in the U.K. , these are so common to me. The population of Ireland is tiny relative to the U.K. so coincidences and crossovers happen all the time.

Two that spring to mind ate being randomly seated for dinner on a Norwegian Fjord cruise - one of the people seated with us at dinner shared a flat in Australia with my BIL 40 years ago.

Last year we went to a retirement party of an old friend in Fermanagh. I started chatting to a lady standing next to me in the bar and we discovered that I used to childmind her grandson when he moved to the U.K. in the early2000s.

DS went to uni in Dublin. On his first day there he was walking down O'Connell St and a lady approached him and asked 'Are you XX's son". That lady used to babysit my DH in London and had since then moved back to Galway. The night before she has been browsing FB and had seen photos of DH and DS on there, then got the train to Dublin for a days shopping and walked past DS.

DH and I went to Canada on holiday. We went into a bar in Saskatchewan. DH was wearing a polo shirt with the logo of a golf club near to his mums home in Sligo It turned out that someone else in the bar was the brother of the groundskeeper of the golf club.

My parents were on evening flight UK-Poland. They were heading to airport car park after midnight and met their neighbour with her daughter. They came to visit from Norway. Airport is over 150miles from where they live. They were waiting for transfer, so my parents offered them a lift. Amazing. How often does it happen. Came from two different countries, at night, living 150miles from the airport and met exactly at this time and in this place.

I was seven when Princess Margaret got married. My mum bought me a souvenir book of the wedding. Hardback with lots of colour photos. A few years ago, having lost my remaining parent I found myself getting very nostalgic. Princess Margaret’s wedding was mentioned on a TV programme and I remembered my book and went on to Amazon to see if I could find a copy. I found one, obviously used, and ordered it from a seller at the other end of the UK. I could hardly believe it but when it arrived it had my name in my writing on the inside cover. I had bought my own book almost sixty years later.

I moved to Germany after graduating and started a relationship with an American. His ex girlfriend had done a year abroad at the university I attended and he had visited her. We were looking at photos of his visit and there I was, in the background. So we had "met" before in our past lives....

My dad's - shortly after he retired he went on a 'holiday of a lifetime' to the USA, visiting various places. When he got off the plane at his first location, who should he find himself next to in the passport control queue - one of his former colleagues!

Whilst looking through DHs family album I saw my aunts house. A semi detached. Turned out the other half of the semi belonged to his aunt.

I really like Rutger Hauer - glad to know he is a nice bloke.