I suppose we were just about due for one of those conversation-in-a-car conversations.

We were riding north, to check out a farm market that I had heard carried locally raised produce, poultry and pork. Since I read Barbarba Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" at the start of the summer, we've been moving steadily toward a more "locavore" diet. For those of you unfamiliar with this term, it means eating food raised or produced within 100 miles of where you live. The thinking goes that it makes no sense to use gasoline imported from elsewhere to move food that could just as readily be found close to you. But when you live in the shadow of a major metropolitan area this can be a challenge, and so we take every opportunity to check out new potential sources of local food. This farm stand was largely a dud--we all concluded at dinner Sunday night that the pork didn't have as much flavor as that from a producer we had identified earlier in the summer--but we did have enough time in the car to have an interesting back-seat conversation.

Which began something like this: What's on the other side of the world from us?

When I was growing up, if kids dug too deeply in the yard the moms would say, "If you keep digging like that, you're going to hit China." This, of course, was back in the time when China was exotic and dangerous, but I suppose that the same labels could have been applied to Russia. Let's face it, anything that wasn't the sameness of suburban America then was exotic and dangerous. And of course the irony of life is that, most of those of us reading and writing the blogs on Adoption.com have spent part of our lives connecting with children in places exotic and dangerous.

But even if I had had a GPS system in my modest Honda Civic hybrid, I doubt if it could have answered Saturday's backseat question. That had to wait until we got home, and picked up our much-worn globe.

And guess what? What's on the other side of the world from me is precisely the part of Russia, Irkutsk that I spent some time writing about last week.

How weird is that?

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