small world

Life goes on in Vernon, and I am there.  But lately I’ve been struck by how interconnected the whole world is.  I met Misoon again this Thursday at Tim Horton’s.  We had a good time together for two hours, a woman from Korea who for various reasons has lived in Canada for seven years and a Canadian woman who wants to learn Korean because she will be visiting her son there in May.  I think we will be able to help each other a lot.  Her English is better than my Korean, but she still needs help with it and with some details of life in Vernon.  I am moving like a snail without slime in my attempt to learn Korean, but I think I will know a bit by May.  I’ve had three other connections with the wider world in the last couple of months.   When I attempted to get map updates for the TomTom I bought, I called the company.  I ended up talking for about half an hour to a woman in Guadalajara, Mexico.  We spoke a bit in Spanish.  A week or so later, I discovered that the plane tickets to Korea that I had bought on Expedia back in August were no longer listed on my ‘itinerary’ at expedia.ca.  It took almost an hour and a half to settle this by phone.  In the course of the conversation, I introduced myself and asked the man I was talking with what his name was and where he was.  He was Fadi in Cairo, Egypt.  It took a while, but he was able to get my tickets straightened out, an Egyptian organizing the air tickets for a Canadian going to Korea.  The latest small world story involves my glasses.  Almost a month ago, I had my eyes checked and decided to get the new lenses put into my old frames.  I really like them because they are so light that they never slip down my nose, even when my face is dripping in sweat, as it often is now that I’m hanging around with the Vernon Outdoors Club.  The optometrist agreed because they are very good German frames.  After two weeks of waiting, I hadn’t been called to pick them up. I phoned the optometrist.  That’s when I discovered that they had been sent to Thailand where the lenses are made.  The factory in Bangkok wasn’t able to fill the order because of the floods and was sending them back.  Now they are being sent to Germany, the only other place in the world that makes these special lenses.  So, I’m wearing glasses that are about eight years old and squinting to watch the news on tv, hoping that the German economy doesn’t tank like the rest of Europe’s economies and that I will have my glasses before I drive to Victoria for Christmas.  We are interconnected and interdependent.  And it takes a lot longer to get a pair of glasses than it used to.  But I can communicate with family and friends in a way that still amazes me, even if I can’t see them and couldn’t even if they were here.