Sometimes, it really is a small world

[gnomi]

(As readers here may remember, my parents are spending the month in Israel and are headquartered in Jerusalem. They just called, and we had the following conversation.)

Me: Hi! Isn't it late there?

Abba: Hi! Yes, it is late. We called you to play a guessing game.

Me: OK, lay it on me.

Abba: Guess who we ran into in the Central Bus Station?

Me: *thinks a minute* zachkessin?

Abba: Got it in one.

Abba and Ima met cousins of Abba's for dinner tonight and then took the cousins back to the bus station. While they were waiting for the bus (and while Abba had wandered off to the men's room), Ima was approached by zachkessin and kmelion.

Small, small world indeed.

Comments

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

Ok I was going to tell you we ran into your folks, but I guess you knew that.

Its a small world, and it was nice to see them.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Abba called me right after they got back to the hotel, I think.

I love small-world things like that.

[angwantibo.livejournal.com]

Okay, how did you guess it in one?

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

I figured it this way -- who do I know who (a) lives in Israel, (b) would recognize my parents, (c) isn't someone my parents already told me they've seen, and (d) might be in the Jerusalem Central Bus Station at night.

After all that, zachkessin seemed the most logical choice.

[42itous.livejournal.com]

Once my grandparents were on one of their middle-eastern safaris, to take in the culchah. They made a pilgrimage to an isolated mountaintop to see the sun rise. To arrive at this sight, they had to take a little airplane up to a remote hotel and get up very early in the morning...

So they get to the mountaintop and there's one other couple there that morning to see the sun rise. And it turns out it's their next-door neighbors from Brooklyn.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Hee! I love stories like that.

There's a couple that mabfan and I know who used to live in the Brookline area (they've since made aliyah). And we'd never run into them in Brookline, but we'd run into them almost every time we went to New York on vacation.

[zsero.livejournal.com]

Some years ago, I decided to treat myself to dinner at Le Marais. And as I sat there, eating and reading an issue of ASFM, a lady approached me and asked whether I knew osewalrus. Turns out she was his mother; she and sundry members of her family, were having dinner there too, and she saw me reading something that looked like it was science fiction of some kind, so she leaped to the conclusion that I must know her son. Which, of course, I did.