Some of the best times I’ve had while in Paris were when we met random English speakers. When you’re in a foreign country, you automatically become long lost friends with anyone else who speaks English. If I were sitting next to the same people at a restaurant in Chicago, we wouldn’t acknowledge each other, but here we crave connection and are linked by our common language.

Tuesday night, in a very small restaurant off the beaten path, we realized that 4 of the other 7 people in the room were American. It didn’t matter that one couple lived on Park Avenue in Manhattan and the other lived in Lancaster Pennsylvania and we’d probably never be in the same social circle in the States—we couldn’t wait to share our experiences and give each other recommendations.

I’ve met a lot of really interesting people from these encounters. Over a cup of hot chocolate after our boat tour on Sunday, we met a couple who had traveled through Europe for the past month. They didn’t look much older than us, but they’d been married for 22 years; he was retiring from the Navy so they were finally doing the traveling together that they’d never gotten to do. Last weekend I met a South African who has lived in Paris a four years and told me about the various places he’s lived and the differences between here and South Africa.

There have been a lot of strange coincidences with the people I met. For example, when I was on a walk one evening after dinner, I heard an accent I recognized. I struck up a conversation, and found out that the man I was talking to was from Erlanger, Kentucky—a few minutes from where I grew up and the same town my best friend lives in (and this guy went to the same high school as my best friend’s husband). As I mentioned in a different post, I met a Brazilian lawyer living in Paris who knew some of my colleagues at Debevoise.

Perhaps they’re not coincidences after all though, and it’s just a matter of expanding your horizons and your interactions. I’m sure if I talked to the people around me at home more often that I’d find that maybe we have a closer connection than 6 degrees. Disney was right, it is a small world, after all.