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what a small world!


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Hi every one 

I was in my classroom this afternoon talking with a year 10 student who using my ICT room and discovered his grand parents lived 10K form where we have our house in france.  We had a really good discussion on all the good things we do when we are there and places we know.

I was wondering if any one else had experiences like this?  You know you go hundreds of miles away on holiday to see your neighbours  or someone you know, walk down the road or you meet some one who has a shared experience?

 

J  x

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hi OK

        Just before we left Wales ,we phoned in the gas, water and electric readings... Being in Wales we were with Scottish power !!! any  way talking to the girl in Scotland we found out her brother lives in the next village from us in France !!! small world

         Dave 

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I have 2 such incidents, I will recant the 2nd later in the thread.

My husband is a building contractor and got the job of a large extension on a private house, he told the clients that he would not be able to start untill the end of June as we were on holiday for 2 weeks , they said that was fine as they too would be on holiday and that would suit them also.

We went to stay in the gite of a friend of ours in the Lot and on one quite dull drizzly day we decided to go to Lacave near Rocamadour, a wonderful underground  cave of stalactites, well there is a small train that takes visitors to the start of the tour which leaves about every 20 minutes from the foyer and returns after.

After we had finished our tour we were exiting the train when I saw my husband go up to a family and start talking. It turned out to be the family that he was doing the extention for on our return!

They had been traveling and camping for 3 weeks all over the south west and had just decided like us that Lacave was a good place to go on a rainy day.

They were as surprised as us to see each other. Like you say small world, Same train, same day , how spooky is that.

 

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I was visiting a friend in Denmark for the first time and on our way to visit Copenhagen she decided to pop into her office at a local hospital, in a little provincial town.  While waiting for my friend, I got talking to the secretary, who turned out to be Polish, like me.  So we started chatting: Which town do you come from?  Oh really?  I'm from that place too!  Ok, which street did you use to live in?  Really??? Which number?  No?! The building next door???!  She was much older than me and that is why I did not recognize her straight away but she knew my parents well and remembered their names.  What a coincidence is this?!

 

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Not a French incident, but still fairly spooky. 15 years ago I became Vicar of a small parish in North Wales. The two people who took the collection that night turned out to have lived within 500 yards of my childhood home in London at the same times as I did, while the churchwarden's father had actually worked with my father in Burma in the 1930's!

Chris

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On holiday in India last November we visited the Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur. I was just coming out into a courtyard from one of the museums but happened to look back over my shoulder.

The long and the short of it is that I met up again with an old friend from before I retired from IBM. He was based in Sydney and we used to meet at international meeting and various conference calls. He is originaly from India and was on holiday there with his wife..... what are the odds of that?

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About six months after we had moved here, somebody asked me if I'd like somebody to go out riding with as the knew "une Anglaise" - a local farmer's wife - who had horses and was looking for somebody to keep her company.  I met her (she lives about 4 ks away.)  It turns out that we went to the same school!
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The French person I replaced in a new job in Chichester turned out to have been landlady to an old French boyfriend of mine during his year as a language assistant in Derby.

We didn't know we all knew each other until they met again at my house near Arundel some 18 years later!
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A slightly weird one from years ago...

I was working at a hotel in Jersey, Channel Islands. A guest came up to me and said something along the lines of: much nicer here than Birmingham, isn't it? in a knowing sort of way. [8-)]

I had no idea what he was talking about till he explained that he'd been driving from somewhere in the north of England to somewhere in the south (I forget the details) had gone through a suburb near Birmingham and seen me get off a bus and cross the road in front of him. I think he was probably stopped at lights or something.

That was probably the only time I'd been in that area of Birmingham and a couple of years later he remembered that fleeting moment when he saw me again in a completely different place. I still feel a bit uneasy about it. [blink]

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As a child, whilst on holiday from Birmingham, I went with my parents up Snowdon on the railway. In the same carriage turned out to be my Dad's cousin whom he had not seen since he was a teenager!

My secretary turned out to have been to the same senior school as me (150 miles away from where we both ended up working) albeit entering as I was in my final year. That's quite frighteming - what stories might there be to tell?!

Pouyade

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When shopping in the Zambian town of Mufulira in the late 60s we spotted a girl who my wife recognised as having lived two streets away from her in Nelson Lancashire.

Similarly, my wife and friend asked for directions in a chemist shop in Salisbury (now Harare) Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The chemist used to live a couple of doors away from the friends Mum in Yorkshire.

When I first arrived in Dubai in 1979 I was looking round the under-construction power station site and heard a voice say " Hi Steve, hows things?", it was an Engineer I had been at college with some considerable years before.

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Three I can think of....first......while walking around Brighton Lanes some years ago we bumped into an aussie guy who John had met while backpacking 5 years earlier! second.....a group of gite guests last year came from Cambridge so at the barbeque I said "my Mum and Dad come from villages near Cambridge, Linton and Sawston" they said...we live in Sawston and worked at Spicers...it transpired my Uncle (Rouse) is a very good friend of theirs. ...third........on checking friend's reunited I saw a name of a girl who was in the same hockey, rounders ect team at St. Marks in Harlow, not seen Pat for some 25 years....quick email to say I now lived in France near Melle....she emailed back to say they too were in France living near Rom just 30 mins away...tis a very very small world.

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Had to get a quote to mend our block's main front door lock in London - the engineer only turned out to live in the same village where my neice-in-law lived until she married, and he knows her mother (but since she is the village hairdresser this is not perhaps as surprising!). 

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In 1986 my wife and I went to Barbados for a fortnights holiday. On the middle Saturday we decided to go to a horse racing meeting at Bridgetown, never having been horse racing before or since.  We decided to stroll around the outside perimeter of the track fence just to take in the atmosphere of all the crowd watching the racing, as we were not particularly taken with the actual races.  Finding a spot on the rails with no spectators we watched the next race.  I caught the glance of a chap standing on the other side of the track against the inside rails and thinking I thought his face to be familiar I walked into the centre of the racetrack where he joined me (when the race had finished).  I couldn't really place where I had seen him before but he explained that he was the son of the couple who lived opposite us at the time in a very small village in East Sussex.
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1    We lived in Oldham and decided we wanted to learn to sail so booked a week onboard course around Plymouth.  After 5 days of some pretty rough sailing weather we decided we would spend a night in a guest house , so we drove around a few streets looking for vacancies signs, there was a parking place right outside one and it looked clean and tidy so we went in. We were shown to a room and decided we would have a wash and to look for a restaurant . As we passed the lounge area I heard an older womans voice and joked to Mr O that she sounded just like the woman from the laundrette around the corner from our house (I had had a few run ins with her in the past over naughtily sneaking in to use only the dryers[Www])

The next morning we were eating our cooked breakfast when this voice boomed from the kitchen `anyone want any more toast?`  I froze as Mr O said he would have some.......the landlady arrived with the toast so I asked her who the lady was ........Oh she said , thats my mum shes come from Oldham to have a holiday with me...............

 

2    A few years later we bought a yacht and worked our way around the Med, we were in Larnaca in Cyprus and met a lady I used to work with, we were having a drink together when her mate and husband turned up..........she was a friend of my mum!

 

3    We own another house in our village ,we had lived here about 3 years and someone had mentioned there was a holiday home owed by an English couple on the same small road as our other house.  One day Mr O met them whilst doing he was doing some renovation works, they got talking and it turns out that he had been a project manager at a factory I had been a manager at........when Mr O told me later and mentioned this mans name I could picture his face.........out of a workforce of about 1500 people!

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One embarrassing one  was taking a girlfriend to Rome on holiday and finding the Receptionist at the hotel was an old girlfriend from our home town.Neither was too pleased!!! When visiting a V.G. in Antrain, we avoided one smoky cafe, went in the next one and having a coffee was a couple who where friends with our next door neighbour in Bournemouth and had been in our garden ,the lady was in charge of security at the store where I sub-contracted the carpet fitting for 13 years. Fortunately she didn't have any need to apprehend me then.

Regards.

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In my wilder days I went on 18-30s holiday to Ibiza with a friend. We went out for the night on an excursion, there must have been about 300 of us and as we turned the corner there were 2 friends from our local back home!

Recently on another forum (not France related) a new member started who had recently moved to France but had originally lived near to where I had lived in the UK. On asking it turned out he worked for the firm that my ex-boyfriend did just down the road and had heard all about me in the early days!!

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Many years ago when walking from the aircraft into the terminal building at Joberg airport  I heard my name being called from the roof top waving area.....expecting to see my friends who had come to collect me I saw a guy I used to work with ......he had disapeared ...just never bothered to come to work one day.............I later learned there was a problem with money....and  a warrant had been issued for his arrest !
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