In 1985, I graduated from University in Austin, Texas... and promptly "celebrated" the occasion by heading back home to Denmark to spend the summer.
Unlike many of my peers — who had jobs lined up soon after graduation — I had no particular plan, aside from spending the summer in Denmark, in part of work at one of several well-paid summer jobs that had helped me fund my education. I mean... the US minimum wage was $4.25/hour, and working nights at my friend's dad's factory earned me about $23/hr... in 1985.
Anyway, on this particular Monday I'd gotten off my night shift at 7:00am, had some breakfast in the city, wandered about a bit... and was planning to spend a couple hours in a favorite store for stamp collectors, once they opened at 10:00am.
Yes, I've been a stamp collector since I was a little kid... and this was back in a time when (at least in Europe) retail stamp shops were not that unusual, at least in cities.
So anyway, they opened and I settled in for an enjoyable morning with a favorite hobby.
Maybe half an hour later, the entire building shook, there was a sound like a distant thunderclap and you could hear glass shattering from blown out windows in the old building across the street.
It wasn't but two minutes before fire truck came blazing by, then an ambulance. Then another ambulance. And more fire trucks. More ambulances... and that probably kept on for ten minutes.
People in the shop speculating whether there had been a major gas explosion.
As it turned out, it was something far more sinister: A terrorist bomb had exploded down the street near the Northwest Orient Airlines office, and then another bomb — a few minutes later — at the Great Synagogue of Copenhagen.
To some, that might not sound like a big deal, but in "peaceful little Denmark," the whole idea of a terrorist attack was so far outside people's reality threshold as to be unbelievable.
And yet, there is was. And by some stroke of I-don't-know-what, I happened to be about a half mile away when the bomb went off. Even though I was actually living in Texas, more than 5,000 miles away.
It was a strange summer...
In another example of extreme coincidence, a few weeks later I was walking across one of Copenhagen's many bridges, and suddenly recognized someone walking towards.
Might not have been so odd if it had been a local friend or family member, even in a city of some 1.4 million, but it was my business law professor from UT Austin! Of all the places and all the people...
The world is truly a much smaller place than we think!
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great week ahead!
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Created at 2024-05-20 02:25 PDT
1150/2408
Attacks like this none of us wish to see happen again, yet it could at any time. Meeting people you know far away from home always a reminder of how small a world we really are.