An Emigrant’s Observation: How Big Is Our Small World?

English
By Anatoly
10 min. read

Sometimes I think about just how enormous our world is. We live in different countries, separated by thousands of kilometres, borders, languages, and all sorts of circumstances. Then a chance encounter happens, and the world suddenly shrinks to the size of a single city, a train, or a few metres near one of thirty festival stages. Since emigrating, I have experienced interesting encounters and surprising coincidences quite often, especially when I think about how unlikely they seem. People from different periods of your life unexpectedly appear in new countries, and you never know how old connections might come together again or where they might continue.

I remember meeting an Austrian acquaintance of my grandfather’s at his home back in the late 1990s. They were working on some project together at the time. It was a fairly brief meeting, and the main thing I remember is that this Austrian gentleman believed he could speak Russian and understood it quite well. But that was not entirely true. A few years passed, and I still clearly remember my first trip to Austria with my grandfather in 2000. Back then, Vienna seemed like a completely different and almost unknown world to me. During that trip, we visited Mayer, a friend of my grandfather’s who lived in Baden. It was the very same man I had met before. At the time, I could hardly have imagined that years later I would move to Austria myself and live quite close to him. When Julia and I were living in Linz, we sometimes visited Vienna and met Mayer again. He is now over eighty years old. And it is still amazing to realise that my grandfather’s friend, whom I first met in Krasnodar and then saw again in Austria in 2000, now lives not far from me. I have settled in Vienna, and I know that Mayer is still nearby, in Baden. Sometimes life connects years and cities in ways you could never have imagined in advance.

There was another unusual experience in my life. Many years ago, my grandfather and I went on a bus tour of Scandinavia. During that trip, I met a young woman named Katya, who was travelling with her mother. This was before social media and constant communication through our phones became part of everyday life. I think we exchanged email addresses or ICQ numbers. I honestly cannot remember anymore. Somehow, though, we managed to stay in touch.

Years passed. I grew older, and so did Katya. She got married, became a mother of two children, and moved from Chelyabinsk to Israel. I got married, moved to Austria, and now live in Vienna. Since then, we have met quite a few times. Katya and her husband Nikita have visited us in Austria. When they travel around Europe, we also try to find an opportunity to meet somewhere along the way. This summer, we made a special trip to Rome to wish Katya a happy birthday in advance. We arranged the surprise with Nikita beforehand. I think she was happy to see us.

There is still something funny about how I explain this friendship to people I know, such as my mother, who had already heard about Katya from my grandfather’s stories. The explanation always sounds almost unbelievably long. Something like: “We’re going to Rome to see Katya and Nikita, who live in Israel. You know, that same Katya from Chelyabinsk whom I met in Scandinavia when I was travelling with my grandfather.” I still haven’t managed to come up with a shorter version! And all these parts of the story really are connected. Meetings like these are warm and heartfelt. They create memories that stay with you for a long time.

When you emigrate, you gradually collect more and more stories like this. For example, while I was studying at the University of Applied Sciences in Steyr, there was a woman from Hungary in our group. One day, we started talking about the Sziget festival, which I have been a huge fan of for many years. She told me that she had worked there in 2016, either in security or as a volunteer. I cannot remember exactly which. But she shared a story with me. During Steve Aoki’s performance, the DJ climbed a technical tower near the stage and started encouraging the enormous crowd to party from up there. She recalled the scene with a slightly wild look in her eyes because she had been responsible for safety at that very moment. Later, I told this story to a friend from Krasnodar who had also attended Sziget that year. She replied that she had been standing near that very stage and had seen everything too. Two people from completely different worlds had been in the same place at the same time. They did not know each other and could never have imagined that years later one of them would tell me about the incident in Austria, while the other would confirm that she had been standing almost right there. And Sziget is enormous, with a huge number of stages and places where you could be!

To give you another idea of just how enormous the Sziget festival grounds are, I will share one more story from my life. Last year, Julia, Misha, and I were travelling back to Vienna from Sziget. Sitting opposite us on the train was a young man whose face seemed familiar. It was clear that he, like us, was also returning from the festival.

Julia remembered where she had seen him before. Some time earlier, we had been at a party in Vienna and met a guy who knew the Caucasus region very well. His father was from Azerbaijan, and he himself now lives in Austria. It had been a very brief introduction, but we had all exchanged Instagram profiles. After that meeting, we did not see him again for several years.

And here is what happened. This guy had also spent several days at the festival. All that time, we had been on the same enormous festival grounds without running into each other once. Then, completely by chance, we boarded the same train and ended up sitting opposite one another. And for about an hour, we travelled like that without noticing anything.

Julia decided to send him a message on Instagram: “Are you sitting opposite us on the train right now?” It turned out that it really was him. We had not crossed paths anywhere for a couple of years. Then we spent several days at Sziget at the same time, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people, and still never saw each other. Yet on the way back, we happened to board the same train at the same time, enter the same carriage, and take seats directly opposite one another. Was that really just a coincidence?

Similar things have happened to us at Sziget itself. Once, among hundreds of thousands of festival visitors, we unexpectedly ran into a woman we knew who was originally from Egypt and lived in Austria. We had met through mutual friends while I was studying at the University of Applied Sciences in Steyr. Later, we went to Oktoberfest together after a mutual friend invited her. And then, one day, we were simply walking across the enormous festival grounds in Hungary when we suddenly saw her with her boyfriend. Among so many people, in another country, at a completely random moment, someone from our life in Austria appeared right in front of us. All you can do is stop and wonder how something like that is even possible. Even after such a coincidence has happened, it is still difficult to believe.

But I have experienced much more local coincidences too. In Austria, I met a wonderful woman who lives in Linz. It turned out that she was originally from Krasnodar. Then we discovered that she was also from Gidrostroy, the very same neighbourhood where I grew up. You move to another country, start a life in a completely new place, and meet someone who literally comes from your own neighbourhood. On a map, Krasnodar and Linz are incredibly far apart. In conversation, that distance disappears within minutes.

And things like this happen to everyone who emigrates. For example, when I enrolled at the University of Applied Sciences in Steyr, our programme had two groups. I was studying part-time, while there was also a full-time group. In the full-time group was a woman named Lera, who had come from Riga. I have a friend named Misha who is also originally from Riga. One day, I mentioned this woman from his hometown and jokingly suggested that perhaps they even knew each other. Misha asked me to show him her photograph. He took one look and immediately said, “Oh my God, that’s Lera!”

It turned out that she had attended his school, lived in the same neighbourhood, and was only a year younger than him. They had grown up very close to each other in Riga and then ended up almost next to each other again in Austria. A year later, Misha also enrolled at the University of Applied Sciences in Steyr. It was quite funny. At school, he had been a year ahead of Lera, but at university, Lera was now a year ahead of him. It is another of those coincidences that simply leave you amazed at how things turn out. An emigrant’s life is full of encounters like these. Over the years, Julia and I have come across so many professional contacts and business partners in cities all across Europe.

And some moments have been truly surprising. When I had just moved to Linz, there was nothing to suggest that another encounter like this was about to happen. One day, I received a message from a woman that began, “Hello, Anatoly Petrovich.” That was how my former students used to address me when I taught at Kuban State Technological University. I started trying to remember her and realised that I did indeed know both her and the young man she was with. They had studied under me and later moved to Prague. He had found a job at Microsoft, and they were now living in the Czech Republic.

Since Julia and I often visited Prague, and still do, we were able to meet them again fairly quickly. Once upon a time, I had stood in front of them in a university classroom in Krasnodar. Years later, we met again in another part of Europe, where each of us had arrived by following our own path. Sometimes you meet someone and are certain you will never see them again. Then many years pass, your entire life changes, and suddenly that person is right there beside you once more.

Encounters like these make everyday life much more varied. They awaken your curiosity about people and make you want to go out again, meet others, talk, and expand your social circle. A good conversation brings new thoughts and renewed emotional energy. You begin to feel confident that you really are connected to this world and have your own place in it.

I also believe that meeting new people creates new neural connections. Your brain starts being surprised again, remembering things, and making connections between people, cities, and circumstances. Life stays young and full of wonderful surprises. Sometimes you get the feeling that everything is only just beginning.

And so, little by little, the whole world becomes your homeland when you emigrate. You can have several countries, several cities, and completely different lives. In each of them, there are people, encounters, and stories that remain with you. And the world is still enormous. It is just that now countless invisible threads run through it, connecting you with other people. Sometimes one of those threads suddenly pulls tight somewhere on a train, in Prague, in Rome, or among the crowds at a festival. And in that moment, this enormous world suddenly becomes very small again.

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О проекте:

Меня зовут Анатолий. Я автор проекта «Жизнь эмигранта». В 2017 году я эмигрировал с семьёй из Краснодара в Австрию. Мы с женой работаем в маркетинге, а для помощи тем, кто хотел бы переехать, создали сайт Emigrants.life.
Проект «Жизнь эмигранта» ― это ежедневные новости о жизни, быте в Австрии и Европе. Переходите на сайт проекта Emigrants.life, подписывайтесь на наши страницы в Telegram , Facebook , Instagram, Twitter , а также принимайте участие в голосованиях в нашей группе в Telegram .

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