What the...? Small world, huh?

So I returned from the Daimonji fire mountain lighting in Kyoto. I had been planning to go for a tad while and what not, but it turned out much more interesting than I had originally thought. The event itself was the lighting of huge fires shaped into the kanji of "dai", "myouhou", a ship, a tori, and a second smaller "dai" on the sides of the five surrounding hills of Kyoto. Although we could only see the biggest "dai", the Daimonji, it was still quite impressive, creating huge plumes of smoke reaching far into the sky and a bright fiery, almost ominous light. While impressive, it wasn't the most impressive thing about the event.

I had arranged to go with Martin and Priscilla, friends who work at NTT, but a week or so ago, I received an email from Sue saying she would be in Kyoto. Sue was my former student at Stanford; she had spent a month at Stanford as a foreign exchange student where I hosted classes on writing there. Like all the students I had taught my sophomore year during STEP, her English was quite good. Anyways, by some very rare and odd coincidence, she was in Kyoto on the night of Daimonji, and I arranged to meet with her to make a very warm group of Stanfordites, Sue, and her Kyoto friend, a Northwestern student named Shishi. The odds of this happening seem, to me anyway, mind-shatteringly slim.

So Sue is working for the UN in Thailand, where she says she's using English much more than Thai. According to her, the problems on the border have gotten worse, escalating beyond martial law into some sort of emergency circumstance. I'm not sure of all the particulars. My Thai has, since learning Japanese, degenerated more severely than I realized. Although my understanding thankfully has not degenerated, my ability to speak certainly has. It is a somewhat damning realization to learn I seem to be progressively becoming less Thai than I had been at the start of my Stanford career, immediately after I returned from Thailand. Nonetheless, even my parents admit that Thai is unfortunately not a tremendously useful language.

Despite the fact Southeast Asian languages are not terribly useful, Priscilla ran into a group of Vietnamese kids at a basutei. With the Thai conversation between me and Sue and the Vietnamese conversation Priscilla was engaged in, it was again a moment where I lost touch with exactly where I was and what I was doing. Shishi, who herself is fluent in all major dialects of Chinese, was unfortunately left out for a short time; it must have very much been as if she were in some other foreign country. Suddenly the 1% of the world that is Thai and the 1.3% of the world that is Vietnamese somehow mattered.

What's even stranger is that Sue and Shishi will be going to Tokyo the same weekend as I am, the weekend of the 20th. Although I made no plans to meet them yet, it's really weird that this sort of coincidence would line up not once but twice. Small world, it would seem; I'm very happy, at least, I am meeting people who mattered to me. Thankfully and with good reason, karma separates alienated lines and reunites related ones.