A number of coincidences

Quite often, when talking to people, I find that we share a number of similar experiences (or coincidences). Things like having lived in the same places, been to the same school or college, having family in the same towns, having the same interests or knowing the same people. I have also bumped into old school friends in places like Nairobi airport. I don't think these kind of coincidences are particularly special - I am someone who has lived all over the world, travels a lot and I really enjoy talking to everyone I meet and will chat to my neighbour in queues or sitting on buses, trains or planes. Under these circumstances I feel that it isn't very strange that quite often similar things come up. However, I have had a few experiences that are quite hard to explain. The first coincidence that I find amazing happened in 1988 and we were living in Sydney, Australia. My husband had been working in Europe and came back home with quite a large amount of money that we thought that we should invest somehow. Several years earlier we had lived in Canberra and I had worked as a Real Estate Agent there. We decided that it would be a good idea to buy a flat to rent out (this was years before buy to let schemes were popular). As I understood the property market in Canberra we decided to drive the six hours to Canberra very early on a Saturday morning to look for suitable flats. In Canberra they have a Multi Listing procedure in place which means that one Real Estate Agent can show a client every property on the market. I therefore rang one of the Agents that I had worked with several years before to set up some viewings. This she did and we made an appointment to meet up with her on the top floor of the shopping mall at 9.00 in the morning. We parked in the carpark but for some reason, instead of riding up the escalator to meet my ex-colleague for our meeting, I found myself walking into a Real Estate Agency on the ground floor. I have no idea why I did this. There was absolutely no reason to do this as all Canberra property is available to every Agent. There were desks arranged at the front of the shop with Agents sitting at them but I ignored all of these people and walked the whole length of the shop (it was a very long and narrow space) towards the back where a woman was sitting at a desk. As I got to the middle of the shop she got up from her desk and came and met me. I explained to her that I was looking for a flat in a certain price range and she told me that just before we came in a flat that she had sold the day before had come back on the market as the people couldn't get finance. She asked if we wanted to see it. All this time my husband was bewildered as to why we were in this Agency and had not gone up to the Agency where I had the appointment. To cut a long story short we went to see the flat and it was exactly what we wanted and we immediately said we would buy it. On the way back to the office the woman said that it was the first property she had sold. I was very interested in the fact that she hadn't been an Agent for very long and asked her what she had done before and it turned out that she had just moved from Sydney, having been through a messy divorce. She had been working at the Deaf Council in Sydney as a Deaf Signer but wanted a complete change of lifestyle. I was even more interested to hear this as I was working with a woman who had also worked at the Deaf Council. To my surprise it turned out that my colleague and the Real Estate Agent (Christine) were good friends. This was a big coincidence but what was even more amazing was that Christine told me that when she had been trying to decide what to do about changing her life she had talked to Margaret (my colleague) about whether she should move to Canberra and take the risk of moving into Real Estate and Margaret had told her that she was working with someone (me) who had lived in Canberra and who had sold Real Estate very successfully and if I could do it then Christine could also do it. On the strength of that she took the plunge and changed her life completely. It seems really amazing that she decided to do it because Margaret had told her about my success and then in a weird way I was somehow led to her and the first property she sold she sold to me! My second coincidence also happened in Sydney. In 1983 my youngest son and I went weekly to a local playgroup. One day a new mum with two little girls joined the group. She was English. She was in Sydney as her husband (a schoolmaster working in a very old and traditional private school in Bath, UK) had negotiated an exchange with a schoolmaster from a private school in Sydney. We really clicked and as she didn't know many people in Sydney we spent lots of time together. During this time my grandmother's friend, Brenda, came out to Sydney to visit her brother. She had left Australia to go to the UK just after World War II, had met her husband and had never been back to Australia in all that time. I knew her very well as she and my grandmother were very close. I arranged that we would collect her from her brother's house (several hours' drive from our house on the other side of Sydney) so she could come and stay the weekend with us. When we arrived at her brother's house they gave us a cup of tea and we chatted. They were so excited as their youngest son was on an exchange in the UK and they'd just had a letter telling them all about the things he and his wife were doing. Of course, we talked about where he worked in Sydney and where he was working in the UK and we suddenly realised that he was the teacher that Paula's husband had exchanged jobs with so she was now living in his house in Sydney and they were living in Paula and Tim's house in the UK. I've realised that all my significant coincidences seem to have happened in Australia! Several years ago we were visiting Australia - having moved to The Netherlands as my husband was working in an EEC organisation there. We had planned a two month trip and were travelling around Australia visiting friends and family. We arrived at Port Fairy just after the annual Folk Music Festival. The town had been full of people for days and so the restauranteurs and retailers were exhausted. Many of the restaurants were closed. We walked around town looking for somewhere to eat but there were only two places open and they were all full. We stood at the door of the second place and were told that there were no free tables. At that moment we heard a shout and my husband recognised a work colleague and his partner sitting at a table for four at the back of the restaurant. They called us over to join them. We were really surprised to see them as we didn't know that they were in Australia. We had a lovely evening together and said goodbye saying that we would see them back in Den Haag - though my husband said that maybe we wouldn't as the building they worked in was enormous and he hadn't seen this guy for a number of months. We were going in completely different directions - they had a trip booked on the Ghan Train which goes from Adelaide to Darwin and we were going to Melbourne and Canberra and then back to Sydney. Imagine our surprise when five weeks later we were standing at a pedestrian crossing in the middle of Sydney waiting for the lights to change when we realised that they were standing next to us!