What hobby instantly makes any stranger 100000x more interesting and enjoyable?

A couple years ago I was in nursing school. I had one professor that was pretty terrifying. Being a man in nursing, you sometimes get the feeling that older nurses treat you different because they see nursing as a woman only job, and that guys shouldn't be there.

What made this class even worse, was that she was the OB/gyn and Pediatrics (obstetrics and gynecology) instructor and also my clinical instructor. So I'm the one guy and along with 7 girls, she teaches inside the hospital.

The first week was terrible. It was like there was nothing I could right. It just seemed she picked on me just because I was a guy and shouldn't be there, but also the girls were scared of her as well. She was just an old, tough instructor. She seemed cold and unapproachable.

One day, during the second week, we're in the hospital cafeteria eating lunch and my cousin comes walking. The hospital we were doing our rotation is like 50 miles from our school, 2 or 3 towns away, so I was surprised to see him come walking in, much less wearing his uniform. My cousin and I were real close growing up, and we both joined the Army and served in the 82nd Airborne together. I had been out for a couple years at that point but he was still in.

We talked for a bit, and ofcourse he wanted to meet the girls in group. I guess my instructor listened in, because after he left, she started talking. She asked me about my service and most importantly about the Airborne. That's when she dropped it on us that she and her husband go skydiving every weekend. She was about 60 years old then (this was all about 7 years ago).

That day, she became a different person to me. She took me under her wing and it seemed she was really interested in making sure I succeeded. She talked me through my first ever IV insertion, and an exploding cyst that showered me with puss while cleaning a woman's infected hysterectomy.

And everyday at lunch, she talked about the skydiving club. She and her husband owned a weekend cabin at a skydiving community. Every weekend, these people got together at their cabins, drank all weekend and went skydiving.

I just liked to imagine that it was a bunch of old retired people that got together and had old people orgies, drank wine and jumped out of planes naked.

/r/AskReddit Thread Parent