From Berlin to Saigon and from California to Cubao

This blog was inspired by my strange small-world encounters. It is fitting that I highlight stories of these kind every now and then. A few months ago, a friend of mine, Grace, met a Filipino photographer in Germany. The lens(wo)man took several pictures of my friend. Last week, Grace got an email from one of her Vietnamese classmates. The sister of Grace’s Vietnamese friend bought a magazine. While Grace’s classmate was flipping through the pages of the Vietnamese magazine, she saw Grace smiling face.
It turned out that the Pinay photographer’s shots of Grace got published in Vietnam. If the sister hadn’t bought the magazine and if Grace’s classmate didn’t read it, Grace wouldn’t have found out about her few pixels of fame.

This encounter reminds me of another story I heard from an American who was based here for two years. Most of his family's appliances have the name of his family placed on a strategic spot on the device. And they sold some of these old but still working appliances (in the States). So imagine his surprise when he saw their old blender in a shop in Cubao. The same blender their family used in California turned up in a shop, selling previously owned stuff, in a street corner in the heart of Manila.

Talk about a world that has become so small, I can see its edge across my 17-inch monitor.