And now, here's Brian!

Please welcome Brian for his first post. I hope it isn't the last. :-)

Meghan has taken my daughter and run away to the south of France with her sister. Well not really, considering I am going to join them on Wednesday night.

It’s kind of surreal. If someone had told me 5 years ago that I would be sending my wife and daughter down to the French Riviera for a week, I probably would have said something like "Angelina always has liked Nice" and laughed it off. But this is exactly the situation I find myself in.

So with the wife and kid gone for the weekend, I find myself working, watching Swiss TV, and actually enjoying watching the maniac bicycle riders who have the guts to climb mountains that I probably couldn’t summon enough energy to drive up. However on Saturday night some coworkers invited me to go see a band that happens to be led by another coworker.

Let me start by saying that they are one of the better cover bands I have seen anywhere. They played classic Rock n Roll and even some obscure Guns n Roses. I was impressed, especially considering not a single one of them was an American. I have no idea how the lead singer sounded like Axl Rose with a heavy Australian accent, but he definitely pulled it off.

Here’s where the story gets strange. About half way through the first set, I see a guy walk into the bar that I thought looked familiar. About 15 minutes later, I am engrossed in a conversation with coworkers and I feel a tap on my shoulder. It’s the same guy and he asks "You went to Lehigh, didn't you?"

Now I will say that I have gone numerous places and always been surprised when confronted with a Lehigh person. Just a couple of weeks ago in Zermatt, a family from Philadelphia saw my Lehigh sweatshirt and stopped me in the middle of the street to have a conversation about their son who was going to enroll at Lehigh next year. But this was clearly out of the ordinary. This guy graduated with me. We had the same major and a lot of the same classes. He lived next door to one of my best friends my entire senior year. Crazier still, he works for a competitor and, like me, has only been in Switzerland for a little over a month.

I won’t lie, I haven’t thought about most of my acquaintances at Lehigh in probably 7 or 8 years, but I was stunned to think that 4000 miles away from campus there is still no escaping the Lehigh Community. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Apparently the band is a favorite amongst the English speaking expat community and therefore it isn’t completely out of the realm of possibility to meet a friend of a friend, or someone who you may have met long ago back in the states.

To be truthful, I think it helped to solidify the whole idea that this really is a small world. The only disappointing thing about the whole evening was the fact that there were no Ho nachos or Yuenglings.

-B