Routes Finding: met a friend on a train, by chance

I was sipping at the platform the hot coffee bought just few minutes ago at Dunkin Donuts while waiting for KTX train for Daejon departing at 8 o'clock in the morning, when I found a man who was looking at me, holding a cup of DD coffee like me.

Hmm, a stange gentleman, I thought taking another sip.

But soon, I felt he was still looking at me as if he had some business on me, and I had to look at him like he did wondering if I had taken any mistakes in the place in that morning.

Oh, man. I see.

I could recognize what the serious eye-sight was, which had been quite familiar in the very old past.. It was Y.

He was one of college alumni who had been quite close each other even though in different majors and was thought to be in NYC right now as a prosperous professor. I didn't know why but we didn't meet or keep in touch each other about more than 10 years so far. The last news about him I heard of was from the newspapers several years ago, appraising his successful carrier in his field. I met him on an early-morning train by chance yesterday. Almost impossible probability!

We studied each other in short after rearranging seats, which were in different compartments, and began to talk about some past memories and about what we were doing at the moment. What I learned was:

Oh, yes, he is still the prosperous professor in the state, researching the light/color-emmitting materials.

The most exciting fact was that it's his sabbatical year and he dropped here before visiting to Singapore for 6 months in Sept.( I really envy his sabbatical!! ) The funniest thing was the fact I talked too much explaining the IT industry trends and market stuffs even though it was he that gave always lessons/classes/speeches to public as a professor. Any of explanation, prospects of something should be his role, I thought. But it was because of his simple question :

You wanna listen to Chemistry things ?

It tooks only 50 minutes to Daejon and it's too short to talk about everything in the past 10 years or more, but anyway I was really happy to meet him and to chat with. Since his destination was similar to me, we got off together and said goodbye after exchanging e-mail addresses and phone numbers.

Last episode. I felt he was almost a foreigner now in that he was keeping the city map in his bag, and throwing away his Dunkin paper cup into a trash can without thinkning about its refund ( as much as 50 won) if returned to any Dunkin's store instead of the trash can.