Straight along the street

My husband doesn't speak English. While my parents-in-law thought he was attending an English language center as a schoolboy, he was in fact ditching classes and earning his pocket money by loading bricks at a nearby construction site. He had attended a few courses before he was lured away. Anyway, to make a long story short: He no spik ingliz.

One day he was running errands in downtown Athens. A couple of english-speaking tourists stopped him for directions. He looked up and down the street and gestured for them to follow him. They did. He turned left and walked ahead leading the way for about 2 blocks and then turned right. He turned around and with a broad grin said: "Straight along the street". The couple thanked him for his kindness and went along their tourist business.

Later on, when he was retelling the story, I inquired why he had walked almost half the way without giving them basic verbal instructions or perhaps a map drawing. He turned to me bashfully, "That was the only sentence I could remember from my English. It was useless until I got them at the point where I could actually use it". Greek ingenuity, you gotta love it!

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