I've finally gotten my act together and started to work on my old research paper that I once started back in Sweden. I took Maja to her child care provider (my friend Gitte) for the first time last Wednesday so that I could do my work in peace. Little did I know about the excitement that was about to dominate the life on this Circle for the next few hours.
As I was sitting by the dining room table, having a skyhigh work moral and being deeply in my thoughts, there was suddenly a man coming towards our house. He boldly leaned towards our patio door and peeked into our apartment through the open blinds. He obviously didn't see me sitting inside, in the shadow on the side of the patio door. I felt an adrenaline rush in my brain, took a couple of steps towards the door, pushed the blinds off and just stared right into his eyes. A young punk. He totally freaked out (oh yeah, I might have had a greasy hair, but ironically, I also happened to wear a CPD T-shirt that day. A souvenir from Chicago.) and mumbled something about being sorry, so sorry, he thought this was his friend's house... Yeah, sure! He rapidly gathered himself and disappeared. This is the moment you think your heart is going to bump out of your chest. Good thing the kids weren't home! What if he'd had a gun?!
Ultimately, the cops invated the whole neighborhood. It was not just me calling them about this suspicious behavior - but one of our neighbors had actually had someone break in to their apt. The police told us these guys have been disturbing people in our area for some weeks now. We had about 6-7 different police officers in our apt. that evening, asking a million questions, same ones over and over again. There were investigators taking finger prints and DNA, police dogs digging around our patio and bushes. Everyone was excited, luckily the kids weren't scared at all. Benke was all hyper doing his own investigation measuring a footprint the suspect bulglar had left on the patio. The cops probably did much more at my neighbor's house, be sure of that - they left his house only at midnight. The next day two tough detectives came to my door and I had to identify the person I'd seen out of a line up of 8 people. Very difficult, a bit scary, not very enjoyable at all. But by all means, kind of exciting. Like in the TV-series, I guess.
So maybe I helped the police to catch the burglars, maybe I was the key person to solve this mysterious crime! Or maybe I was just one of many tiny actors in the statistics of unsolved crimes. I wonder if I'll ever know.
Life is getting back to normal here anyway, it's quiet and peaceful again. The punks must have left us alone after the show off. But I'm sad to say there is a new, although a slight, sign of insecurity I didn't have before.
//Hanna
