What are you doing here?!

It was late October 2007 and I was in a ticket line (I mean queue) in Paddington Station, London. After I got my ticket I walked out of the ticket area into the main train station hall. In front of me a glass door opened and a man my age, with a big hiking backpack on his back, stepped out. We looked at each other for a second before recognition set in. Here was a New Zealand bread maker named Colin, a single-serving friend I made five month ago in a Madrid youth hostile. We ran around Madrid for four days together, museums, dinners, drinks, clubbing, and attempting to pick up chicks. Colin and I shook hand and started laughing. What line of events caused two people to meet twice in a life time, months and hundreds of miles apart? We found a place to sit and recount our stories of what happened between Madrid and Paddington Station. He was on his way north to meet up with his brother (or cousin) and I was on my way down to Hampton Court Palace (one of Henry the 8th palaces). I missed the first train because the second train gave us enough time finish our conversation. We exchanged contact information again, and then went our separate ways.

This is either amazing because it's so rare or because it happens often but we don't recognize the people we meet again and again. Another thing could be that a certain life style causes the same sort of people to go to the same sort of places. So the world isn't quite as large as its surface area per person. Like I'm a traveler and Colin is a traveler. We were both traveling around for months. Madrid and London, though big, are much smaller than the earth, and you could shrink it down further saying that even within those cities there are only a few places or regions we would visit. Once you remove the distance and location issue, you are only left with time. So, it was less amazing that we were both in the same place, it was more amazing that we happened to be there at the same time. One of us could have easily changed one thing about our day which would have caused us to be in Paddington Station on the same day, just at a different time.

But anyway way I look at it, it's still pretty awesome.