A Bag of Apples

So this a seriously belated post. About 4 months late actually.

I never knew that a hand drawn picture and a bag of apples could make me feel so welcome.

I was sitting in the exchange office with Aimi and Ayumi, waiting for Nakamura-san. As we were talking, an old man walks in and says “You must be Sharon.”

He sat down and asked how I liked Japan, and if I’d been anywhere else yet, just the usual conversation. I had no idea who he was. Anyway, after a bit of chatting he asked me if I had any fruit. I’d been to the supermarket the day before and bought some oranges, but that was all, and I said as much. At that he opened his bag, and pulled out a dozen apples, and handed them to me.

Yeah, you read that right, he pulled  a dozen apples out of his bag, just like that.

He is a lecturer at Meijo, and one of his old students works for an apple company. (The ex-student is a delivery driver and would drop off a crate of apples any time he was in the area.)He had received a crate of apples two days ago, and thought of someone who might need fruit. Having been an exchange student himself when he was in university, he thought of me. 

 He was once a student at QUT Gardens Point Campus, and wanted to know how the campus had fared in the recent floods. And he desperately wanted to know how the Gardens Café was doing. When he was in Brisbane his absolute favourite thing to do was to have a Devonshire Tea at that café.  Upon hearing that it wasn’t destroyed by the floods he was so relieved. He would’ve been devastated if it had been destroyed, as he had so many fond memories of the place.

After he left, I found out that he is the head of the Economics faculty, and I will probably take his class, later in the semester. Such a generous act from a complete stranger made me feel so lucky to be here. Everyone had been so nice to me already, and then on top of it all another welcoming gesture, and from a complete stranger, it just blew my mind.

 Turns out he is quite possibly the coolest old man I've ever met, and I wish all my lecturers were like him. And he takes his classes VERY seriously, he completely lost it at some guy who fell asleep in his class. Kicked the guy out of the class and told him to never come back. Poor guy probably would've failed anyway.