Interesting coincidences in your life?

[Art_from_Ark]

I have had quite a few coincidences in my life, especially related in some way to Japan. One of these occurred when I was a graduate student. One day, a professor from the University of Victoria (British Columbia) came to give a talk in my department. I was totally unaware of this until one of my fellow students grabbed me by the arm and told me a visiting professor was giving a very interesting talk in the room across from my office. So I slipped into the room as the professor was starting his talk, and was surprised to find that he was going to talk about his experiences in Japan. He worked his way up from the southern islands, through the main island of Honshu, eventually bringing his talk around to the northernmost island of Hokkaido.

"When I was in Hokkaido, looking out over the Sea of Okhotsk," he said, "one of the locals told me that ice floes covered the sea in winter. Since this part of the sea is at almost exactly the same latitude as Victoria, I had a hard time believing that that could be possible. To this day, I think that that person was probably pulling my leg." With that, he ended his talk.

It just so happened that a month or so before that, I myself had been in Japan, and had taken the long train ride from central Honshu all the way up to the Sea of Okhotsk. While there, I had bought a packet of post cards which I was keeping in my office. I slipped across the hall to my office and looked through my post cards, picked one out, and came back to the lecture room.

"Sir," I said, as I handed the professor a post card of ice floes stretching as far as the eye could see, "the Sea of Okhotsk in winter!"

[snacker]

1. My daughter was running a marathon while in college and

the whole family came to cheer her on. Afterwards, we all went to her apartment. My son's girlfriend (now wife) noticed the names on the mailbox and realized(after several pertinent questions) that my daughter's roommate was a sister to her first college roommate (different university).

[Redstone]

2. I just got in touch with an old friend from when I lived in Pennsylvania.

She's in New York now. And it turns out that, because of what she does for a living, she knows a guy I went to school with in Vermont in the early 1960s. (He still lives in Vermont.)

How's that?

Redstone

[Art_from_Ark]

3. Cool

:7

[alarimer]

4. I went out with a guy who lived in the same places I had

at roughly the same time but we never met until we both moved to Texas within a few months of each other. It was pretty weird.

[Art_from_Ark]

6. I've got something similar

I live about 40-50 miles out of Tokyo, but I go to a certain shop in Tokyo quite often. One day I was talking to the proprietor, who asked me where I lived and what line of work I did. When I told her that I lived north of Tokyo, she said her son did, too. In fact, he worked at the hospital about 100 yards down the street from the school I taught at, which is not in the same city I live in. After that I was offered another job in a different city about halfway between my old school and Tokyo, and, as it turned out, her son quit his hospital job and set up his own clinic about 300 yards from where my new job was! And the proprietor's grandson is attending a high school that I can see from my house! But, I've never met either the son or the grandson.

[Kerrytravelers]

5. As a child, Mr. kt attended church with the woman who would someday

marry the guy who introduced us. She moved away as a kid (from San Diego to Los Angeles) and was set up with her now husband on a blind date! Mr. kt and I were in their wedding and they were in ours!

[swag]

7. My secretary's name was "Lincoln" and my Lincoln's name was

"Secretary."

But that was in another country and besides, the wench is dead.

[Art_from_Ark]

8. Well, my fish's name was "Cat"

and my cat's name was "Fish"

[Missy Vixen]

9. Our former next door neighbor's first name was Julie

She and I have the same birthday. Her son's name is Eric. My husband's name is Eric. What are the odds that we would buy next door to each other?

It was a bit creepy.

Julie

[Art_from_Ark]

11. When I lived in the States, people would often mistakenly call me Brian

My mother told me that "Brian" had been her second choice for my name

[MissB]

10. My brother's birth mom approached

our aunt because she'd heard about our aunt's proficiency at hooking up adopted children and their birth parents. She of course had no idea that our aunt was related to us in any way.

Didn't take them long to figure out who the kid was. :)

[LynzM]

12. Weirdest coincidental events I've experienced...

I live in CT, drove down to the southernmost part of New Jersey to attend a Coast Guard graduation ceremony. The guy I was dating was graduating, and his mom, aunt, and father had driven down in two cars (mom, cousin and aunt in one car, dad with another car to bring him and his stuff home). It's about a 7 hour drive, on the highway.

We stopped on the way back to grab a late lunch, and as we're pulling in, we see a car that looked an awful lot like his mom's... yup, she was having lunch with his aunt and cousin, so we joined them for lunch! Crazy!

We stopped about 3 hours later at one of those rest stop/restaurant/gas station places. Guess whose car is there? His dad's! So we got to visit with them a bit (didn't really get to 'visit' at the grad ceremony) before we all took off again. Totally crazy! :crazy:

____________________________________________________________

I was at a train station in Prague, overheard some people speaking English, and said hi. We got around to talking about where we're from... guy mentions he's from Northeastern US.

Oh, I'm from CT.

Oh, really? I'm from Old Lyme.

You're from Old Lyme? I dated a guy from there for almost 3 years.

Really, who'd you date?

Xxxxxx Xxxxxxxx

You dated Xxxxxx Xxxxxxxx?! No way!!

It was surreal. I'm 5000 miles from home, and randomly meet a guy in a train station who knows my ex-boyfriend. The same ex mentioned in the story above. Bizarro.

[Art_from_Ark]

13. I was in Japan, 5000 miles from my university,

and quite by chance I met a Japanese man who happened to know the professor I was studying under.

[dolo amber]

14. I was about to get evicted

I think I stumbled upon a drugs money drop or something...conspiculously inconspiculously laying on the back of the toilet of the girls' bathroom in an envelope in a bar, I found $550. My rent was $550.

One of those stories I hate telling cos it makes me look like a lyin' fool, but hand to whomever it's the truth. I have witnesses! :D

[Art_from_Ark]

20. Sounds like you had a guardian angel

I kept hoping something like that would happen to me during my dirt-poor days, but alas, it never did.

[dolo amber]

21. I truly to this day recall that in amazement

I mean, who has that life? :D

[LibDemAlways]

15. I have a second cousin I had never met

though I heard she had moved to California from New York to be with her boyfriend and had accepted a job as a speech therapist.I had no idea where in California she was living. One day just before my daughter started kindergarten I received a call out of the blue from my cousin. The job she had accepted was as a speech therapist at my daughter's elementary school. She had been looking over the class lists and spotted my daughter's name. What are the odds?

[SiobhanClancy]

16. I met both my husbands at Heathrow airport.....

Years apart,of course. Also...my father,brother,2 great-grandmothers,2 uncles,3 cousins and my daughter were all born on the 8th of March.

[TroubleMan]

17. The Marine Corps is a small world:

My first year in the Corps (1992) I was in communication school in 29 Palms, California. One night we were at a party that took up about three or four hotel rooms out in town (I think it was the Hillside Motel). That night there was a huge earthquake centered only 10 miles away (I think it was this one: http://www.data.scec.org/chrono_index/landersq.html.).

Four years later I was in Okinawa for a year. I became real good friends with one guy. We went to clubs together; we always hung out together; if I was going out with a girl, he'd go out with her friend, and vice-versa; we went half on a car to get around, ect, ect. We were like brothers. Anyway, after the year is almost over, I was telling him about the time I was at a party in 29 Palms and there was this big earthquake. It turns out he was at the same party - in fact me and him and a group of others had stood outside in a circle talking for about 30 minutes, and as soon as we figured out we were at the same party we remembered the conversation. All this time we had hung out together for about 10 months, and had never realized that we had been at one of the most memorable times in our lives at the same time. Also, it turns out the girl that I had hooked up with that night, he ended up dating about a year later. Biggest coincidence of my life.

____

Another coincidence in the Marine Corps was that I was in the Quantico messhall (the one next to barracks 2005, for those who've been there), and I met one of my best friends in high school there. It turns out he had signed up just like I had, and neither of us knew that the other had joined the Corps.

___

One more coincidence: I spent about 6 years on Quantico. I met my wife there. Anyway there was this guy who had dated my wife after we had broke up (we got back together a few years later). It turns out he also dated two other women in the same area, both after I had dated them, and in the same order as I had dated for all three. Me and this guy never had met until after the fact of all this. A couple of years later I was hanging out at one of the women's houses that we had both dated (me and her remained good friends), and he showed up to hang out, too (he remained good friends with her, too). Until that time we had never met. We were both in the Marine Corps, approximately the same age, dated all the same women in the same order, and we were even in the same battalion. We had heard about each other, but had never met until then. It was sort of weird, because I was thinking this guy would be a clone of me or something. He wasn't....we look very little alike, and have very different mannerisms. We got along okay, but it still felt weird talking to the guy for some reason.

[Kat45]

18. Had weird coincidences involving two guys I met thru match.com

One man who I dated several times is about 8 years older than me. My senior year in college, I had a boyfriend who co-hosted a country music show on college radio. This man was the person he co-hosted it with! (I'd lost touch with the old boyfriend years ago.) A second coincidence with the same date: he knew our fellow DUer, Squeech, a number of years ago.

I was supposed to meet another guy from match.com at Starbucks one night at 7. I ended up being late that night, and when he didn't see me there at 7, he left. Come to find out, he ended up being a man who comes to my church occasionally. He realized it, talked to me after church, and we did go out a couple of times. (Even more strange, I had a weird feeling it was that guy even before the first non-meeting.) It also turned out we were both members of the National Writers Union during the same time period, though we'd never met. I didn't know too many people in the union, but he asked me if I knew a particular man, who'd been his roommate. Turned out he was the only person I knew pretty well in the union.

[clyrc]

19. When I met my husband, I knew I had an ancestor

who had lived in Jamestown in the early 1600's. About four years after we married, his retired uncle had spent years researching his family's family tree,and we found out that my husband had an ancestor there at the very same time. Mine was a convict sent for twenty years as a servant, while my husband's ancestor was a mason, but it was a small place and I bet they at least saw each other. Since my husbands family is from Florida, and mine is from Oklahoma, and considering that there were so few people in Jamestown at the time, it's an amazing coincidence.

Another weird coincidence was that I had a high school friend in Hawaii who got in touch with me several years later. I told my husband about her, and she sounded familiar to him. It turns out that she went to the same University as my husband, in Florida, and she was friends with his college girlfriend.

[Jean Louise Finch]

22. I was learning to snowboard in Zermatt

In Switzerland, with my brother and his (at the time) girlfriend. He was mostly watching the two of us bobble uncoordinatingly down the hill and offering words of encouragement (he could already snowboard; in my own defense, i can SKI, I was just being nice by snowboarding with his girlfriend -- who actually turned out to be evil in the long term). ANYWAY. There was one other guy on the slopes equally incapable as myself, and he eventually sat himself down next to my brother. They started talking once this other fellow realized that my brother spoke English, and it all ended up that this random guy on the slopes of Switzerland was one of the closest friends of my cousins living in Perth, Australia.

The really weird thing is that this family of cousins has more random links to people all over the world than anyone ever. Which is very strange, considering that Perth is perchance the MOST isolated place in the world.