the old man at dunkin donuts

while standing at the clib bus stop earlier today, i saw a pair of exchange students and thought about how we might have looked to the uconn students when we were the exchangers. i recall, as i watched the 2 chit chatting, that we mostly went around like a little nucleus, carelessly speaking singlish to one another and not really caring that the people around us probably wouldn't, if they tried, fully understand what we were going on about (add to that the fact that we also speak, like, fast). we were for the most part in our own world - a world involving failure to wake up for a significant number of morning classes, dining hall hopping on school days & city/state hopping on "holidays", hanging out in the halls/rooms/lounges of mcmahon and plainly having a good time. that was how the 2 girls looked to me too.. haha.

anyway, i randomly recalled one time when we were at Walmart (it was our last visit to Walmart; we were spamming chocolates), sitting at the adjoining dunkin donuts, and we were mainly just wiling away the remaining (hours of) time we had left after choc-shopping for the next bus that would take us back to campus. the 4 of us sat at a table w/o ordering anything for a while, just chit chatting, nua-ing and occasionally looking over to the menu behind the counter and discussing what we were gonna have.

(sidetrack) the difference between nua-ing at an eating outlet there and nua-ing at at eating outlet here (w/o ordering anything) is that over there they let you nua whereas here you get killer stares followed shortly after by a manager requesting that you buy something or get your butt out.

so we just sat there. then we started taking change out of our wallets and pooled it together to see what we can get (tiffoo: hot choc, val: thinking about gingerbread latte, ely: feeling for a donut, eliza: anything also can), adding up and subtracting items from our to-order list.

while we were nua-ly counting out our change, an old man got up from the table adjacent to ours and placed a dollar bill in front of us, saying "i remember when i used to do that too".

needless to say, we totally melted.