Small world after all

A trite saying . . . A tacky ride at Disneyland . . . Something you flippantly say when you are about to move to a new place far, far away for a long period of time . . . and perhaps an undeniably true maxim for our ever-shrinking globe.

Case in point:

I spent the last three days in The Netherlands visiting a friend from graduate school who is doing an internship with an organization in The Hague. (Off the topic of this specific story, I can tell you that I really enjoyed my visit to Holland and thought Amsterdam was one of the most beautiful places I have been. I also saw some amazing art in person with my own eyes: van Gogh, Vermeer, Rembrandt!).


On the last evening that I was there, Pasha and I headed to Delft, a town just outside of The Hague and within walking distance from the place where Pasha is living. You can see a picture of the lovely village as it was painted by Vermeer on the right (I saw this painting myself in The Hague the following day). It's a smaller version of other cities I visited in the Netherlands and has beautiful churches, lovely cobblestone streets, and canals snaking through it. If the funny-sounding name of Delft does not roll off your tongue familiarly, you may recognize it visually in its blue-and-white Dutch porcelain, Delft Blue or Royal Delft. We stopped for some dinner on the square and enjoyed a charming evening in this historic and attractive place. Of the many topics of our dinner conversation was an encounter that Pasha had previously in Delft when wearing a small town Minnesota baseball team t-shirt, the town being a rather small farming town and far, far away from the Netherlands, to say the least. A man rushed up to him, excited to see such a display of hometown pride as he was from that very place. A small world.

The small world only began to reveal itself when we left the outdoor terrace of the restaurant in search of a glass of some good Dutch beer. On our way home, we saw an open door to a pub next to a church (I have often wondered why it is that pubs in Europe are always next to churches...). We walked in and Pasha inquired at the bar about the kind of beers they had on tap. The man wearing a vest on the other side smiled and informed us that he had only good, cold beer. At this moment, a man approaches us and says, "I don't know you, and I don't know you either. Who are you?" It was clear that the pub we entered was in fact something private, and we began to awkwardly reorient ourselves as a few people gathered around us, awaiting our answers.

At that moment, I noticed the large man who had inquired was proudly sporting a yellow t-shirt on which was a monogram of a bucking cowboy and the name of the most magical and wonderful state, Wyoming. Instead of answering the inquiry, I turned and asked him where he got such a t-shirt. Long story turned short, the man was from Casper, Wyoming, about two and a half hours south of my hometown, and he was a doctoral students studying mining in Delft. The pub we turned into was the local mining fraternity. After exchanging a few stories about rural Wyoming and the like, we chuckled and parted. A very small world after all.