dispatch from the hostel

While a little less personal than the last hostel, my current place of residence has still provided plenty of conversation with other travelers. Interestingly, this place seems to attract infinitely more Americans (actually by my calculations 1500%) and with all those Americans, who by the way are still dwarfed by the population of French basketball fans here, the conversation topic of "where are you from" usually occurs. And with that a couple of curious coincidences have come to the fore. A couple nights ago I was chatting with a women in her late twenties, who, after going to Berkeley for college, lived in Oakland for six years, before moving to New York City and attending Teacher's College at Columbia, meaning she's lived in both the cities that I've lived in and attended the same university. This morning, I discovered another one of these geographical coincidences, this time even more unlikely. Chatting with a guy from Seattle this morning, I discovered he grew up in a town near Augusta, Maine and then lived in Missoula, Montana before coming to Seattle. That means that he had lived very near to the places that my two maternal aunts do! I'll keep you posted on any exciting new developments in the coincidence front.