Originally I had meant to come home tonight, take a shower and finally get to unloading my thoughts on District 9. I was going to have a spoiler warning and everything. I got derailed halfway from my target. Usually it takes me 15 minutes to walk home from my restaurant - Mayflower. As I turned the corner and walked towards my street - listening to the Grudge and thinking about how an old friend of mine was holding a grudge against me and how stupid it was -I noticed someone walking towards me. It was a young girl holding a bag. In hindsight I guess she approached me because I looked somewhat young like her and that must have been reassuring. So my night got interesting from thereon. Funny how I didn't find out her name until around 30-45 minutes
after our initial conversation.
She literally said something like "I'm looook for haaause vis naaamber seventy, is near pizza". Okay maybe her English wasn't that horrible - but Ekaterina (as her name was, which I found out when I called the police later) was looking for a house with the number 70 - it turned out she didn't know the street, didn't know the phone number, didn't know anything. This was a little frustrating. I was game though - I've watched too many detective films/tv shows not to be. Generally I'm a ridiculously curious person - so this was right up my alley.
She kept changing her mind about the number, first it was 70, then it was 77, then it was 7. We kept stopping and starting over - she rang a doorbell but nobody was home - then we talked to some people on the street and found out it was the wrong address. We walked towards Timothy Court - which is maybe five minutes away from my house. We had basically done a loop. She was lost without any information. Here as an exchange student learning English, just the day previously she had changed her "home stay" location and her "home stay" parents hadn't given her the address or the phone number or their last names? This was strange. I just rolled with it and eventually on Timothy Court I decided to call the non-emergency police phone number. The area that now had to be covered in order to find her place of residence was too large for me to handle alone.
So I got ahold of dispatch and they collected some information and told us to wait (if I felt safe) until they sent someone out. Five minutes later my phone rang and a police officer let me know that he had emergencies everywhere and apologized profusely but it would be several hours before anybody could be sent out. Then he stepped away from the phone and found out a squad car was just near us but was responding to a "priority domestic" some husband and wife were beating each other up. I found it interesting that he told me this. So he suggested that if possible I could bring Ekaterina to the police station. I thought about what the fastest way would be - so I called my brother and asked him to come get us - but my mom doesn't trust him with the car because he's 17 so she decided to come herself. (I do not drive - having lived downtown for the past 5 years)
We piled into the car and headed down to 22 Division on Bloor/Kipling. We got there and had to explain the story two more times to the annoyed/bored looking officer. He was pretty receptive but I was unimpressed with the lack of procedure for this situation. Ekaterina had told me that she was studying English at the International Language Academy of Canada and that her "home stay" parents were "administrators" there. Surely the police must have some way of looking up who works there - some sort of roster. But apparently they don't and couldn't do anything with that information until the morning at which point they would just call. This seemed unacceptable to me - as did the fact that Ekaterina's "home stay" parents didn't give her any damned information that might - I don't know - be IMPORTANT to her. Eventually the police procured a sexy Russian speaking lady officer and she took over and they started hashing everything out in Russian and we were told we could leave. I asked Ekaterina if she was hungry or needed anything - she replied that she didn't - and seemed really embarrassed. I gave her my phone number, email address and a hug, and told her to somehow let me know when she got home. I hope she's okay. She had been here for six weeks and is supposed to be flying back to Moscow on Saturday.
On our way out I said to my mom preemptively "I know that if this happened to me in another country you'd want someone to help me out". She replied that of course she would but she seemed really annoyed. It turns out that I interrupted her new episode of CSI. Then everything devolved into how I don't clean my room. Life back to normal.......
D9 review tomorrow I think...
P.S. Incidentally Ekaterina said something that resonated with me - that all the houses in the suburbs look the same and it's very easy to get lost. I know this because a year or so after I moved in here my friend Skye and I went for a walk together further up from my neighborhood and got lost in the winding maze of cul-de-sacs for several hours. And we're from here.
