Tales From Giovanka: The Lost Purse

I met Giovanka (and Alison) for lunch in the BLUU again.  It's nice because it doesn't just feel like we are doing forced discussions for a class, but more like just catching up on each other's lives.  I'm so used to her accent that I find myself forgetting that she only recently learned English until she asks how to pronounce a word every once and a while.  Also after talking with others I realize how big of a challenge it is for some people to meet with their conversation partners, so I'm really glad that I got someone so willing to meet with me.

Most of our conversation this time was spent on Giovanka telling me about her adventure in finding her lost purse.  I'll try to relay the story here.  So Giovanka had a tiny purse that she accidentally dropped getting into the car on a street near campus.  When she got back she realized that it was gone & it had her money, phone, keys, ID, and all of the really important things you need to do basically anything at TCU.  She alerted the TCU police but they said that they couldn't help her find it since she lost her purse off-campus.  The next day she looked up the location of her phone with GPS on the computer and it showed that was in the middle of the highway nearby.  They called the phone & a person answered who agreed to meet them and return the phone.  Giovanka drove with a guy friend near the place where she thought that she had lost her purse to meet the man.  They could see the phone moving closer to them with the GPS tracker & figured that the man was driving towards them.  He wasn't.  It ended up being a homeless man who was walking to meet them.

The man returned the phone to Giovanka.  She asked if he had her purse and he said no so Giovanka and her friend turned to get back in the car.  The man then turned around and said that he did have her purse but they would have to drive to go get it.  They let the man get in the car with them (which she said she realized afterwards how much of a safety violation that was) and followed his directions to one of the bridge overpasses.  The man got out of the car and disappeared under the overpass for a few minutes.  He came back with her purse with all of her ID's, keys, etc still in it.

Giovanka was telling me how thankful she was that she was able to get everything back and that nothing bad happened.  The whole time she was telling me the story I was like "no you didn't?!" with each turn of the story, thinking about how dangerous it was.  Of course Giovanka's parents were less-than-thrilled when she told them about losing the purse and all she did to get it back.  Besides just chatting about other things, this was what most of our discussion covered this time.