I joined my husband on a weeklong business trip the first time I traveled to Tokyo. It was a city he knew well after more than 25 visits, and in the weeks leading up to our trip he filled my head with intimidating images of a city and culture more foreign than I had ever imagined Tokyo to be. After listening to one story after another of undecipherable signs and strict social formalities, I boarded the plane bound for Narita International Airport feeling less of the adventurous confidence I usually had on journeys that added a new stamp to my passport.

As is usually the case when I’ve tried to create snapshots of an event that exists somewhere in the future, the actual experience was not nearly as intimidating as I’d envisioned. I spent my first day wandering around Ginza and Harajuku, two wildly different areas of Tokyo—one being Tokyo’s answer to Park Avenue, with high-end department stores and designer boutiques, the other ground zero for fashion forward teens parading their most daring ensembles. Despite all the misgivings I had before I began my first day of exploring, I felt totally at ease by the time lunch rolled around. I figured out the subway system without any catastrophic detours to other parts of Japan, and found the people helpful, polite and graceful in their own reserved way. This was true from sales clerks who delicately wrapped a single postcard, to taxi drivers who turned off their headlights when idling at stoplights. I remember feeling a strange wave of relief when I stumbled across a group of teenage girls squealing and giggling as they shopped for Hello Kitty knick-knacks. After so much quiet reserve and perfect composure, seeing these mirror images of my awkward, high-strung, seventh-grade self was a welcome sight.

During my week in Tokyo, I spent each day exploring a different part of the city. Towards the end of the trip I was feeling out of sorts, growing weary of being the oddball everywhere I went. No one did anything to make me feel like an outsider, but as a blonde, taller than most everyone, in a sea of dark hair, my own sense of otherness began to occupy more space in my brain. I was walking in one of Tokyo’s business districts, and happened upon a small pet store with a huge glass window. As I passed by, I looked inside and saw a woman in a business holding a squirming puppy in her arms.  It was a tiny puffball of brown fur – a creature that could have easily been mistaken for a stuffed plush toy—wriggling around as if glitter and rainbows were exploding inside its belly. This creature was consumed by joy, brimming with so much energy that I couldn’t keep my eyes off of it. And when my glance moved from the puppy to the woman holding it, I was given the gift I had been longing for in a city that was obviously not my home. Trying to hold what looked like a wind-up toy gone haywire, this woman was laughing hysterically, and once we made eye contact, I no longer felt alone.

I never went into the store, but stood outside looking in for nearly ten minutes, watching the puppy and exchanging hysterical glances with the woman. It was likely neither of us could speak the other person’s language, but in those few moments we understood each other perfectly. Without exchanging words, notes or hand signals, sharing the same kind of laughter I experience with my best girlfriends, we made contact.

I will never know if the woman took the puppy home, but I think about her every time I remember that trip and am grateful fate decided to intersect our paths. Through that giddy sparkle in her eyes and uninhibited laughter, I saw what she looks like when she is told a fiercely funny joke, and maybe I was also given a glimpse of the way her face lights up when the love of her life tells her she is beautiful. As we shared laughter, we shared stories, the kind that people all over the world tell in their own language and dialect. I was looking for a way to feel connected to a population of people that was beginning to feel…foreign. And all it took was a few minutes of hilarity to remind me that no matter where I am, there are stories to be shared. Across an ocean, I am sharing the story of this woman’s laughter, and maybe she has since told the story of a funny American woman standing outside the store when she bought the puppy that is now a dog sleeping quietly at her feet. Stories can be created anywhere, with anyone, in a glance, a giggle, in the middle of another country. On an afternoon stroll in downtown Tokyo, this woman and I tied a knot and wove these few shared moments into our life story, where they will always remain a joyful reminder of all the connections that are there for the taking every time I step outside my comfort zone.

Christine Mason Miller is a Santa Monica-based artist and writer with nearly 15 years of art, design and illustration experience. She is the author of Ordinary Sparkling Moments,  a book that combines her artwork and writing about finding wisdom in everyday life, released in August 2008.