Irony

It turns out that Real Analysis is good for something, if for nothing more than an as excuse to practice my Spanish skillz with a Chilean. I spent the last year of my life hating RA and determining to show it who was boss by not dropping out. A lot of the other students were grad students from other programs, such as electrical engineering and economics. In particular, a Chilean econ grad student at NU was taking the course. I didn´t personally know Álvaro, but I knew he was Chilean. I thought that was cool, because I was going to attend school in Chile. Álvaro did the most of anyone to single-handedly scare me about the Chilean language. I happened to hear him animatedly speaking in "Spanish" (Chilean) one day in the econ department with another Latino. I understood a few words of the sentences I heard...

Fast forward to yesterday. I was roaming the campus of PUC Chile, where I go, and as I walked through the Hall Universitario, I saw a familiar face. There was no doubt that it was Álvaro. I almost walked on as though nothing had happened, but I couldn´t. I caught his attention and asked him if he went to Northwestern. We ended up chatting in Spanish for a few minutes, in which I learned that he went here for his undergrad, and he´s here over the summer visiting home and his girlfriend. Funny how you can spend a year in the same classroom with someone and never say a word to him, but when you see him 5,000 miles away from your university, something changes. It´s a small world, after all.