Santiago Serendipity
Santiago Serendipity
by Richard Rindone | Santa Fe, NM
One night in Santiago my wife and I wandered a few streets until we found a restaurant with outdoor service. We sat at a table for four, when along came a Chinese couple. They stood around looking for a table and heard us speaking English and we struck up a conversation and invited them to sit with us. Turns out they weren’t a couple; they had only met by accident and wanted to sit and eat and talk.
The woman’s name was Ping Zhang, an artist from Beijing who was traveling quite a distance across several continents. She had something to do with female artists and had done some kind of show in Boston, had traveled through France and now Spain, and would be heading back to China. She had a room in the hotel upstairs, so she ran up and brought down her sketchbook. In addition to typical Chinese art, she had sketches of French and Spanish churches and scenes done in a western style.
The man’s name was Frank Chan, but he called himself “Pancho.” An ethnic Chinese born and raised in Hong Kong as a British subject, he worked in computer IT in London. He had a few days of vacation, so decided to escape London for sunny Spain on a cheap Ryanair flight. Ping’s English was halting so Pancho would often translate for her.
It was an oddly interesting, totally serendipitous evening for a Chinese artist, a British-influenced Chinese IT professional, and two Americans in Spain.
