Learning Strategies

Here I am, enjoying my vacation in the tropical paradise of Elmira, New York. No, wait! I must be thinking of someplace else. Elmira isn’t a tropical paradise — it’s a cosmopolitan urban center with hundreds of exciting cultural opportunities to choose from.

Well...no...it isn’t that either. It’s merely where I have to go to visit the in-laws.

But perhaps you’ll detect a certain theme to some of the people I ran into during this visit:

• The scruffy-looking man hurrying past me as I’m unloading the car, pausing only to ask, “I just found a VCR; do you know anyone who would like to buy one?”


• The guy in front of Barbara and me in the cashier’s line at the drugstore who tells us (over and over again) how he couldn’t find an electric menorah anywhere else.


• The helpful customer in the super market who looks at the Bounty paper towels in our cart and proceeds to tell us why we should buy Viva instead, going into great detail about their coefficients of absorbency and the exact differences in unit prices between different types of Viva.


• The library patron who gets my attention as I’m about to enter the public library and proceeds to say, “Did you know that somebody died from a hangnail on this very spot earlier today? He was standing there bleeding to death, and I tried to call 911 but couldn’t get through.”


• Another library patron who proceeds to ask me questions until I say that I’ve only been there for ten minutes, whereupon she apologizes and said that she assumed I was a librarian.


• A third library patron who walks up to me to tell me that he had found a wallet-sized calendar and asks me whether it’s mine.

OK, enough of that. Stay tuned for posts on our B&B and the Chemung Valley History Museum (the two truly interesting things about our visit).

Labels: food, travel