To ask Strangest Place you have bumped into someone you know?

[TomLee475]

I was in Germany recently and bumped into someone I used to work with in India.

A few times...
I was underage (just) having an illicit weekend away with boyfriend (who I worked weekends with) and bumped into a customer. Very awkward.
I had holidayed in Spain with my daughter. The next year we did a big move to the other end of the country. The first week there I bumped into someone we'd been friendly with!
The oddest one was Glastonbury. It is SO VAST. The chances of bumping into (and recognising) somebody you haven't seen for years is quite slim. It really wasn't a happy coincidence tbh 🙄

My daughter had one.
In the run up to her father's funeral they had a gathering in a pub.
She was approached by a woman of similar age who said she knew her, but as I've just said, we moved away when she was a kid.
This was the child of an old acquaintance. She wasn't there for the gathering, knew nothing about her dads passing, had only gone there to meet a new boyfriend. She recognised my daughter because she looks so much like me!!
Very small world really.

My Mum took me to the Hellfire Caves in West Wycombe (not near where we lived) for a day out when I was a child. We bumped into her childhood friend from North London, whom she hadn’t seen for 20 years. They were driving home from a visit to friends and had randomly decided to stop off as it sounded interesting.

Thought I saw a friend of mine from Paris at the airport in Addis Ababa, although I knew she was working in West Africa at the time. Messaged her on FB and said “Did I just see you in the queue for security at Addis airport?” She had been on a training course there for a week, and was leaving as I was arriving.

On a ferry as a teen, about 3am I was struggling with lack of sleep. I went for a walk and walked straight into my PE teacher. On the same holiday I was in the market with my brother and uncle, my brother dropped his wallet and the guy who retrieved it from under a market stall was his music teacher. Both only realised as he handed it over.

At my now SIL's wedding 12 years ago, I met the best friend of my friend's mum. I knew virtually no one at that wedding except my now-DH and his parents but got an invite last minute when someone cancelled. During the drinks, lady introduced herself and said "I'm from (small village in Devon)." I replied "really, my friend's mum ---- is also from there." "Really?! She is my best friend from school!" I was 8000 miles away from friend and mum then.

This is my grandpas story.

When he married my grandma, for some long complicated reason, his best man had to pull out at the last moment. So my grandpa had to ask someone else. I think it was just a good friend from work, in the end.

Then, once grandpa returned from honeymoon, he found that his replacement best man had been re-deployed to another office, in another part of the country (they were both government scientists, and this was right at the end of the war), and my grandpa never saw, or spoke to his best man again...

Until he ended up standing behind him, in line at the check-in, at San Francisco airport, a good 30 years later.

we live in Hertfordshire,wile on holiday in the furthest point in Cornwall we met my daughters teacher lol

Orlando Florida ,we met my other half's friend on the day he proposed to his misses lol

My primary school teacher was in a caravan with his family next to us in the south of France

Some school friends in Lego land In Denmark

Some friends we'd made in Tenerife, in my hometown

Random people we'd met backpacking in SE Asia bumped into them a few times in Oz, Malaysia Thailand et and as we all did the same route pretty much.

Kayaking in Canada.. we were the only ones doing it and the guy running the shop was from my home village.

Bought a house in a village in middle of nowhere, had been there a couple months and one morning my car was playing up. One of the neighbours who had recently moved in came over to see if he could help, it was a schoolfriend I had attended nursery, primary and senior school with.

I was once the first person in a meeting room , in a pretty remote and specialist location (Boulby Potash Mine). It was long before Outlook invitations etc and we dud but knoe who else was attending. When the next person arrived, I got up, walked across the room and shook his hand. He said “You must be X’s sister”. I said I was and how did her know ?. He says that I look a bit like him, my mannerisms were just the sane, and he’d mentioned what field I worked in. Correct in all counts, but still a massive long shot!!

Not quite what you want but on honeymoon, years ago, we were on a boat returning from the Thai Islands to the mainland. We were all packed in and DH and I nabbed a place to sit up top, wedged in between others and sat in the blazing sun for hours. I was sat between DH and a guy from Wales. He mentioned where he was from and I told him I'd lived with a girl at uni from that Welsh town. Turns out she was his cousin!!

Not so far away as some but...

DH went fell walking this week to bag some of the Wainwright’s and on his way down one Fell he met a dog he recognised( DH doesn’t usually recognise breeds let alone dogs) followed soon after by a woman who lives in our small village walking up.

Years ago we met someone at a steam train from the village we used to live in 300 miles away her mum used to work for my dad.

My mum was on a train from Scotland to London and got chatting to the people opposite. They mentioned that they lived in Windsor and during the conversation that they were Polish. Mum said thirty odd years before that we had lived in Windsor for a couple of years and that the people in the lodge house were Polish and we had been very fond of them. The people of the train were best friends with them! Mum was leaving for Australia so couldn’t visit them but she wrote a little message for them.

I work in a public library and it happens quite frequently I'm somewhere totally different and someone will come up to me and say, hello I know you from the library. One time was the Science Museum in London. Also bumped into a friend outside the Louvre, 😊

Way back in the early 90s, DH bumped into a family friend by a phone box in Hong Kong - they both lived in Essex.

In Disney California we saw one of my daughter’s friends - we live in the Home Counties and they live in Dubai

On a beach in Cornwall a few years ago we saw one of my son’s classmates.

Sitting outside Novosibirsk railway station one morning, a man I knew in the UK walked past.

3am, halfway up the M4, in the service station, met up with an old friend from teenage years that I’d long lost touch with.

On a bus in Poland, two people I work with got on.

Long time ago now. Worked in Greece for a year in 95-96 at an English school. A few of us at different schools would meet up on the weekends and go out including a girl called Jenny who lived down the road above another school.

Fast forward to end of 1999 and I'd just spent two years teaching in Tokyo and was in my way out of the HR building on my last day. Who should I see walking into the building as I was going out but Jenny!

On the "it's a small world" ride at Disneyland Paris a TA from the kids school; guess what we said?!!!!

I've bumped into people on holiday in, Egypt, Florida and Cyprus but they are holiday destinations so I wouldn't think it strange, as such.

I'd consider the strangest one when we were coastal walking in Cemaes bay at 6am. It was a friend of my DD's, whose Mother had won the lottery (£4 million) and he'd gone up to look at a boat for sale (his dream) . He was getting rid of his puppy because he couldn't commit to her now and we bought her off him.

On a jeep trip with three other people, all complete strangers, in the deep interior of Iceland to see the northern lights. It was January and the middle of the night so freezing cold, dark and very isolated. I notice one of the other passengers kept looking at me very curiously. We struck up conversation, all very pleasant but she was stilllooking at me very oddly. Obviously my paranoia was at its peak when she suddenly said “i hope I don’t sound mad but do you know X”. X is my best friend and I was best woman at her civil partnership. X keeps a photo of this on her desk at work and this woman was her colleague and had seen the picture. So we had a great chat about what a truly gorgeous and lovely person X is!

'Bought her from him', not off (for the pendants).

Australia. Neighbours I lived next door too when growing up who were originally from Australia, their son had gone back there and was in a bar I was in.

I remember when I was a kid, we were on holiday in the Carribbean somewhere and made friends with a family there. The kind where you hang out all holiday then dont really stay in touch.

Then 6 months later we bumped into them in a restaurant, skiing in Austria! bizarre

On a flight from Singapore to Melbourne I sat next to a guy from my local pub in the UK!

A girl from school at a random waterfall in Nepal...we weren't that pleased to see each other tbh.

My h met his mate he hasn't seen for years in Abercrombie and Fitch in Las Vegas.