Small World Coincidences, Part Two

Running into the same travlers becomes pretty common place since we all use the same guidebooks and tend to cluster around the same neighborhoods, but the other day in Darjeeling, I had not one, but two, small world encounters.

My trek finished in Rimbik, a small mountain village about four hours by jeep from Darjeeling. We were waiting for the jeep, supposedly coming at 7 a.m., which by Indian Standard Time, means more like 7:45 or 8, if at all. There was a German guy, about 20-years-old also waiting in the tea stall. We started chatting and did the mandatory "where are you from" questions. Ater I mentioned that I grew up in Illinois, he said he had spent a year in Illinois during high school on an exchange program. I asked where and he replied, "Have you ever heard of a town called Bloomington?"

I about choked on my chai. Turns out he was actually in Danvers, a small farming town just outside of Bloomington. As we chatted about my hometown, I started feeling kind of bad that he came all the way from Germany to see America and ended up in the middle of a cornfield for a year. He said that it was pretty common for foreign exchange students to end up in the Midwest because the families were the most open. This is true; some chemical in all that corn makes Midwesterners are some of the nicest people you'll ever meet. He also visited the University of Illinois last year to reconnect with his old buddies from Olympia High School. He was telling me about the frat houses he visited. Ah, the wonders of a shrinking global society that allow me to have a discussion about the U of I's Greek system in a remote Himalalyan village with a German.

The second experience that had me whistling Disney's "It's a small world after all" occurred when I returned to Darjeeling to check into the Hotel Dekeling. (I decided to upgrade from my $3 per night hotel with limited luke-warm water to the $15 per night Dekeling as a present to myself after finishing the trek.) On the door was a "Principia Panthers" sticker. Prin, for those of you who don't know, is the small Christian Science college near St. Louis that many of my AU buddies hail from. Turns out the Dekeling is where two professors, also AU people, bring their students each year for the Himalayan Abroad program. The hotel owners showed me letters from the students who stayed there, and as is common in the "four degrees of speparation" world of Christian Science, I knew most of them.

At this rate, I'm expecting to run into my Kindergarten teacher in Kerala.