Whilst I think I understand the purpose of this grammatical device, I'm confused by its usage in the following sentence:
雑誌の占いコーナーを読んでいたら、「日本人は占いが好きです」と、外国人の友達が話しかけてきた。
たら I thought was for expressing conditions or situations that might happen - but from this sentence it sounds like, the second clause definitely DID happen. And as such the たら would appear to take on more of a 'when' function - as in 'when this (definitely) happened.... this happened, rather than 'if this happened/happens... this would happen. Was my previous expectation of what it was supposed to be correct?
By the way this is the first sentence of a passage so whilst I would love to give as much context for the quote as possible to aid people trying to answer the question, there's not a lot more I can do here.
