Cultural exchange

[liv]

One of the things I love about my job is that when you're helping people to redesign their teaching they ask you for advice about all kinds of random things. This one I think I need to crowdsource:

My colleague is running an exchange trip where she's taking some of her students to Washington DC along with some students from a Southern US state. She wants to take some small gifts / prizes for the American students.

So my question to American or American-knowledgeable friends is, if you were an American college student, what small, inexpensive, transportable item would you be excited to receive from English visitors? Are there any (snack) foods you think of as excitingly and exotically British?

And to my compatriots, what should my colleague take that will seem like a nice souvenir of England or the UK? Particularly, can you think of anything that is typical of Cambridge the town but isn't about Cambridge Uni?

Comments

[slashmarks]

Tea was the only thing I could think of, too, and I agree that I would be shocked to hear anyone found it offensive. Southerners are aware that sweet tea and hot tea are different drinks and hot tea is also drank in the South; it's just that the unmarked default is sweet, so you have to specify to get something else.

I would probably be careful about going for something with some kind of novelty value, though, since tea *is* a thing drank in the US, like, make sure the brand isn't widely sold in grocery stores here. Candy might be better in terms of appealing to more people but is not likely to strike any of us as particularly British.

Non indigenous Americans rarely think about the Revolutionary War in relation to its political circumstances or the country it was fought against (as opposed to a vague sense that it was fought for Freedom and Democracy in abstract) at all.