From another thread comes.

>Some years ago we arrived in St Denis, Montreal and stopped to get a hotel room for the night. The proprietor was Indian-Asian and we conversed for some time in French. After a while he asked where I was from. When I told him Brighton, England he revealed (in English) that he was from Shoreham, just a 10 minute drive along the coast from Brighton. Small world!

Seems like an interesting topic, so I have two small-world stories with which to bore the readers.

I have an identical twin brother. We went to the same college but were in different fraternities. About 6 years after graduation my brother is walking out of the lobby of a hotel in Taiwan. From the bottom of the steps he hears his name called. It was one of my fraternity brothers. About 5 years after that I'm on a train pulling into Grand Central Station in New York. The guy in the seat in front of me gets up, turns around, and calls out "RICH!" This was someone from my brother's fraternity. Granted it's not unusual to run into people you know in strange places but for both of them to be able to tell us apart after all those years seemed otherworldly.

Other New Yorkers will recognize the "Where in New York" game that we play whenever we run into somebody else from "The City." "You're from New York? I'm from New York." "Oh, where in New York?" The game usually ends after drilling down only one (borough) or two (section) levels. I once had an assignment in Fairfield, Iowa. It's a small city of around 10,000 people. One of the people working there found out I was Jewish and decided to have a Passover seder for the out-of-towner. I started plaing the "Where in New York" game with one of the other people there. After about 10 "where in's" we discovered that, as children, we had lived right across the street from each other. While I didn't know her, my older brother told me that he remembered playing with her younger brother. Small world.