Jayd and Fill.

Today around twelve thirty, Kyle, Phil,  and I decided to walk to Which Wich for a sandwich.  Let me first say that:

• I was wearing short sleeves because it was a spectacular day
• It is very convienient to be able to walk to a Which Wich from your house becuase Which Wich is delicious
• My Which Wich frequent buyer card is full now so my next wich is free.  You might consider joining me when I enjoy my free wich.
• The Which Wich by my house has outdoor seating right by the street.   So like usual, we sat right next to College Ave today to eat.  Not like we could see it from behind some security fence, but like if you lean back too far a car will pwn you and your wich.  I think that’s cool.

 

Today while we were enjoying our sandwiches, I looked up just in time to see a group of maybe thirty foreign students cross the street and go into Starbucks.  There are a lot of foreign students at CSU.  The engineering program is home to many smart, rich, Arabic-speaking guys who ace physics tests but are impossible to get into study groups with.  They wear Armani and drive sick cars, but now and then you’ll meet one of them who is really humble and wants to get to know you.  I met one of those kids today.

 

This guy wasn’t actually Arabic, although I couldn’t tell the difference (dumb American).  He was from Brazil and walked out of Starbucks and over to our table while we ate Which Wich this afternoon.  For a class in speaking English he had to do a survey of some sort, which explained the large group of his dark-skinned friends.  He politely asked if he could ask us each a couple questions.  He started with Kyle.

 

“What do you know about Brazil?”

Phil: “It’s the largest country in South America!”

“Yes it is.”

JD: “It has lots of Brazilians!”

(At this point he burst into loud laughter until he heard what Kyle, the person he was questioning in the first place, had to say)

Kyle: “They speak Spanish!”

“Portugese.”

 

After this he moved on to me.  He asked for my name and wrote it down as “Jayd”.  I loved that.  He asked me to explain how the weather works in Fort Collins, and I started by telling him that sometimes it was cold and snowy.  Before i was finished, he wrote down “cold snow” and went on to the next question.  ”Do you like living in Fort Collins?”  ”Yes”, I answered “Very much.”

 

He moved on to survey Phil about the nightlife in Fort Collins, which is ironic becuase Phil usually goes to sleep at 10.  He wrote down Phil’s name as “Fill”, of course, and preceded to interpret both of Phil’s answers, writing down “Old Chicago” (somewhere he had obviously been, and something Phil hadn’t said), and “Get drunk”, another thing Phil probably didn’t say.

 

I thought about this guy a lot today.  He never told us his name, but his smiling face is still all over my mind.  I wonder what it’s like to be a resident alien like that.  He’s far from home and deals with a huge communication barrier every day, not to mention that his only close friends are the ones that speak his language (Portugese apparently…).  I don’t have anything profound to say about the situation, but it’s amazing to me how much he had already learned about America and our culture before even speaking our language properly.  Of course neither Kyle, Phil, nor myself have ever been to Brazil, but we couldn’t even tell him the language spoken there, although it does seem fair to me to guess Spanish.  As we walked home from Which Wich later, I realized that I need to learn more about other cultures.  There are really so many different cultures, but we are wrapped up in our own so tightly that it blows our minds when a hispanic person speaks a language that isn’t Spanish! Maybe I’ll study Sociology.  That could be interesting.  

God made people to be very different all over the world.  That’s cool.  God is cool.

~ by JD on November 19, 2008.