It's a small world

We had company for dinner this evening: Elias's buddy Anne and her parents and three siblings. After Kaffee (the ritual 4pm German carbohydrate and caffeine fix), the kids went over to the school playground to expend some energy. When the doorbell rang a short while later, Stefan got up to let the kids back in--but they weren't at the door. Instead, he encountered the brother and sister-in-law of our new upstairs neighbors. The neighbors moved in yesterday, while we were still out of town.

The brother and sister-in-law live in Heidelberg, about an hour and forty minutes north of Freiburg by car. They rang our doorbell because they recognized our names on the mailboxes outside.

Thus it was that we happily reconnected with Mary Beth and Hans-Walter, our former housemates from Tucson, AZ--folks we lived with some twenty years ago, and whom we haven't seen since 1995. MB runs her own copywriting, copyediting, and proofreading business; Hans-Walter is a director at the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie in Heidelberg. Contributing to the small-worldness of the evening, Anne's father knows Hans-Walter's brother.

In novels and films, such coincidences seem contrived ("of all the apartment buildings gin joints in all the towns in all the world..."). In real life, they're amazingly cool.