The most crazy, unbelievable, funny coincidence...

of my trip was:

NOT that my cousin Anne and I discovered we were both to be in Lima on July 29^th, and arranged to meet for dinner in the artsy neighborhood of Barranco,

NOR that the feminist science fiction novel I traded to a fellow traveler in Galapagos was offered back to me by someone else several weeks later at a book exchange in Peru,

NOR that in this age of cell phone communication, where meeting up with someone seems to require that both parties are continually in contact via phone up to the very instant their eyes meet, that WITHOUT having spoken or seen each other in over a month, I was able to meet my friend Alejandro (coming from Argentina) at 10pm on July 19th in a hotel in a tiny Peruvian town neither of us had heard of previously,

What I still can barely believe happened, was that while Alejandro was flying a local airline from Lima to Trujillo (Peru), he saw me on TV! When we met up, he said “I don’t know how it can be true, but I was meditating on the plane, and when I opened my eyes, I swear I saw you on the TV.” I scanned my memories, trying to think of how I could have inadvertently ended up on an airplane safety video? Or maybe in a crowd scene of Superman 3? They did film right outside my health department office last summer…

He said, “It was really bizarre, you were inside one of those portable toilets, and when you tried to get out…”

“I stepped into some kind of a board meeting!!”

It was me!! It was that Canadian version of Candid Camera that I randomly ended up in when I visited Montreal last summer. Justo Por Reir (Or…I don’t know how they spell it, it’s in French so it probably has some extra silent letters “Justeax Pourt Reirrrre.”) Anyway, you may or may not remember the crazy story of how I ended up knowingly participating in the filming of that strange, (supposedly candid) segment, but I never imagined anyone I knew would ever see it, since they told me it was only going to air on TV in Quebec. Now my fame has spread to LanChile flights within Peru!! And someone I know was there to witness it.

Postscript: Jaimee (wouldn't you know it!) said she found the clip on YouTube. http://youtube.com/watch?v=E0kW73NbT2Y

my moments of fame are even briefer than i imagined!