Yesterday I got to go to the dentist and get my top front teeth replaced; lucky me :-) I was early to the appointment and the dentist is in a new shopping center and the space next to him now has a cleaners. I have a hand-woven, antique, textile and I'm looking to get it cleaned so I went in and asked about whether they could do it and the young woman gave the "right" answer; she'd have to look at it and if they couldn't they'd send it to an "expert" and, yes, they knew a textile expert.

The young woman was very friendly and we started talking of other subjects, she mentioned she had been studying for a couse; she had a Bible open and another book on top of that. I asked what the course was and it was related to Western Religions; Roman/Greek and the "background" to the Bible and Europe's Christianity, that sort of thing. I got the impression from how she accented "Western" that it wasn't her native belief system but I didn't want to pry into her personal info. But we started talking about language and the difficulty she is having writing a 7 page paper. I topped her :-) as I'm taking a course now too and have a 15 page paper to write. But we both agreed the language is difficult for her; I told her about my classmate last semester from Burma and how I'd helped her. I finally asked where this young woman was from and she's South Korean. But we talked about all sorts of interesting little tidbits; her biggest problem is Western "names" when she's reading because they're so long. Korean names are usually maybe 3 letters, "Kim" and the like. She says she has trouble with English and French names because of their length.

I finally dragged myself away and was late for my dentist appointment :-) I'd stood talking a good half hour. I'm going back soon and take my regular cleaning, hemming, textiles :-) with me. Perhaps we can talk more about her course and mine and I can learn more about her and her beliefs. I just found it interesting the chance encounters we have and love thinking about whether they are "chance" at all.