The World, He Is Small

I experienced quite the small-world coincidence today, which seldom occurs when almost everyone you know lives across an ocean.

I had two morning classes and two afternoon classes scheduled today at La Défense, the business district situated on the outskirts of Paris. However, my second class got cancelled and so I had a three-hour gap in my schedule. Rather than spend half of it riding back and forth between La Défense and home, I took my laptop and planned to write and hop on a wi-fi connection.

So, I was walking across the Esplanade at a time that I wouldn’t normally be doing so. All of a sudden, I hear my name called, and it turns out it’s an old colleague from my Travelocity days, who I haven’t seen in over four years. She’s French and had lived in the States for several years before returning to the mother country. I had some vague memories of her coming back to Europe, but I wasn’t exactly sure where she’d moved and these memories were so buried in my brain that I hadn’t remembered to seek her out when I emigrated.

Anyhow, coincidence worked in my favor, because she was on her way to work, very late in fact, and thus out on the Esplanade at a time she normally wouldn’t be. It turns out she lives outside Paris and works at La Défense. Our accidental rendez-vous was probably even stranger for her, because although she knows my husband has dual citizenship, what on earth was I doing here, of all places? I’ve never been so glad to have a big gap in my schedule (when they happen at La Défense, I usually spend them alone, drinking coffee and reading or just wandering the local mall, which is the only thing going in those parts). It was great to reconnect and see a familiar face for a change!

What’s even funnier is that this isn’t the first Travelocity-related coincidence to pop up in my life in Paris. After living here for several months, it came to my attention (thanks to my good friend and former TVLY co-worker) that a former colleague of ours was also living in Paris. She and I got in touch and it turns out she and her husband moved here around the same time as us, for the same reason, and lived within a 15-minute walk from chez nous. Parallel lives, much? It was a wonderful discovery, and now we see each other regularly.

Who else is going to come out of the woodwork from my former life in the travel industry? And is this a sign of some sort?