{"id":485,"date":"2015-09-08T23:56:40","date_gmt":"2015-09-08T23:56:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smallworldstories.com\/?p=485"},"modified":"2020-12-17T17:12:43","modified_gmt":"2020-12-17T17:12:43","slug":"three-countries-tied","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/smallworldstories.com\/?p=485","title":{"rendered":"Three Countries Tied"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I was living on the 9th<\/sup> floor of an apartment in the heart of downtown Zhong Li, Taiwan with a gorgeous view of the surrounding mountains\u2014about an hour southwest of the capital city Taipei\u2014where I was teaching English. It was around 9:30 at night and I\u2019d just gotten home from teaching a class of children ranging in age from 6 to 13 years old. The hallway, as I made my way from the elevator to my apartment at the end of the long hall, was dark like it normally was at that time of night\u2014one side covered with large windows that let in a small amount of light from outside\u2014when I realized someone else was walking down the hall behind me. Curious to see who else might be coming home so late I glanced behind me as I reached my door and realized that I must have a new neighbor. A fellow foreigner coming home for the night, I decided to say \u2018hi\u2019\u2014living abroad you tend to become a lot more comfortable with reaching out to strangers and starting conversations with fellow expats.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We started chatting and I quickly learned that he\u2019d just arrived from China where he\u2019d been teaching and had been hired by the same English Academy that I worked for. He was working at another branch, but had gotten the apartment on my floor and had moved in that week. As we continued talking I discovered that he\u2019d also studied Japanese in college and then, even more shocking, learned that he\u2019d studied abroad in Nagoya, Japan at one of the schools with which my alma mater had an exchange program. After I told him this, we found out\u2014much to our mutual surprise\u2014that he\u2019d actually studied at that university with one of my old friends from the University of Iowa who\u2019d studied abroad in Japan a year after I had. Who would\u2019ve thought that a few years later this guy from Ohio, who\u2019d befriended my friend from Iowa when they were exchange students in Nagoya, would end up moving to Taiwan, working for the same company as me, and end up becoming my neighbor\u2014and eventually my good friend? We both marveled and laughed at the shocking connection and couldn\u2019t wait to tell our mutual friend that we\u2019d not only met<\/i><\/span> each other, but were practically living next door.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was living on the 9th floor of an apartment in the heart of downtown Zhong Li, Taiwan with a gorgeous view of the surrounding mountains\u2014about an hour southwest of the capital city Taipei\u2014where I was teaching English. It was<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":484,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-friendship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/smallworldstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485","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=485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/smallworldstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/smallworldstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/smallworldstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/smallworldstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/smallworldstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}