<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In 1992, while in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China during my Semester at Sea study abroad program, a doctor from Madrid, Iowa came up to me after seeing my Iowa State sweatshirt.\u00a0 <\/span>I was so excited to meet a fellow Iowan on the other side of the world!\u00a0 <\/span>After the doctor got home, he and his wife sent my parents a lovely letter saying how they\u2019d met me China. \u00a0<\/span>A few years later, I\u2019d moved to Sydney, Australia and was watching a performance in the Sydney Opera House on Christmas Eve. I was feeling a bit homesick being so far from home during the holidays. But when I turned around, I was surprised to meet some people from my home state of Iowa.\u00a0 <\/span>Coincidentally they were also from Ft. Dodge, Iowa and happened to know the doctor I\u2019d met in China and even shared the same last name.\u00a0 <\/span>Even more, they were actually related to the woman who owned the shoe store in Knoxville, IA\u2014my hometown!\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n However, the connections didn\u2019t end there!\u00a0 <\/span>Over 20 yrs later, while flipping through a scrapbook with a friend, I happened to come across the letter from the couple from Tiananmen Square. My friend exclaimed, \u201cOh my gosh, that is the doctor who took out my tonsils!\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>What are the odds that my connection to that Iowan doctor would span 3 continents over 20 years?!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 1992, while in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China during my Semester at Sea study abroad program, a doctor from Madrid, Iowa came up to me after seeing my Iowa State sweatshirt.\u00a0 I was so excited to meet a fellow<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-globally"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/smallworldstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/smallworldstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/smallworldstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/smallworldstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/smallworldstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/smallworldstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/smallworldstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/smallworldstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/smallworldstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}