Richard Armitage and Thorin Oakenshield made my day today

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The floor my office is on has a lot of students from other countries. We run a program where you can apply to our university and if you don’t get a sufficient TOEFL, you can take a few courses for college credit, usually math or science, while you work on making your English good enough to be admitted. A lot of the classes are held on my floor and a few days a week I listen to pronunciation practice (which amuses me because often the teachers have a very deep Southern accent and it’s hilarious to listen to Japanese students imitating it) and impromptu explanations of American culture (there was a long discussion of tipping this week) and occasionally grammar exercises. Every now and then it’s annoying, but mostly it’s fun — like the week before Thanksgiving last year, when I was interviewed by six foreign students about what I planned to do for Thanksgiving and then had to explain why I wasn’t going home — because they’d been told in class that Americans always go home for Thanksgiving — usually with reference to a map of the United States.

Anyway, today a young man from this crowd, wearing an American flag t-shirt, walked past my office once or twice, then stopped in the doorway with his phone pualled out. Usually that means someone wants directions. Instead, he said, politely, “Can I take selfie of this?” put his arm around Thorin Oakenshield, and snapped a picture. Then he turned, said, “Thank you,” and walked away.

That pretty much kept me smiling all day long.

~ by Servetus on September 22, 2015.