On the other side of the window is a very startled woman who was in the middle of straightening her hair! She drops her hair straightener and gapes, and then hurries over to open the window (it does open, but only from the inside.)

"I come in peace," Jean informs the woman, because she might just be an alien who looks human to casual inspection, and first contact calls for a slightly grander greeting than thank you, I was worried I'd have to break the glass.

Clambering in nimbly through the window, he adds, "Where am I?"

"Oh good," she says, "I was worried you were a robber." It's a slightly cramped apartment and no two pieces of furniture are in the same style, though most of them have flowers on them. "You're in my apartment, in Paul, Minnesota. How did you get up there?"

That wasn't enough time for his universal translator to pull a corpus from local transmissions, so they're speaking something that's already in the database, or at least a close relative. Human, then, and if she's not identifying the planet, this is Earth, although he's not sure he remembers a country called Minnesota. Or she's an idiot. That's always a possibility. Certainly the design sense would seem to suggest it.

"I encountered a localized spatial anomaly. At closer range than would have been ideal."

"Oh my. You know, I don't think that's ever happened to me before, at least not if it causes you to end up clinging to buildings. Does it usually?"

"It's never happened to me before either! Two of the last five people who fell in came back out as salamanders. They're still not sure about the other three. I don't suppose three other people have showed up clinging to buildings lately?"

"As salamanders? That's horrifying! The poor people! Can they be turned back?"

"The engineers seemed to think it was likely! Certainly I prefer the abrupt relocation, though. I take it I'm on Earth?"

"You sure are! - were you not before?"

"Not a bit! It's going to take me a week to get back."

If all goes well and he doesn't have to get fancy dodging any checkpoints.

"Wow, I never met an astronaut before. Do you have weird muscle and bone problems? I heard that when astronauts get back from space they often have weird muscle and bone problems."

Astronaut! How charmingly antiquated.

"Oh, I'm not, ah, an astronaut. Just traveling." He has no idea what she's on about with bones and muscles.

"Well, this has sort of been delightful and I kind of want to manufacture an excuse for you to stay but I should probably instead ask you to leave because I'm supposed to be getting ready to go to a concert."

"--ooh, a concert. Something good?"

He's momentarily sidetracked from his situation. Performance art is always exciting.

"It's, uh, My Wife And Her Cat, I'm mostly going because my boyfriend's really into it. You said that like you want to be invited to come along but I'm worried you'll make things weird with my boyfriend, like, hey, here's this fairly cute guy who showed up in my apartment today, I invited him on our date."

"Ah," says Jean, who knows better but can't help himself, smiling roguishly, "but am I not cuter than your boyfriend?"

"You are cuter than my boyfriend but I'm not going to dump him for you on those grounds, he has several other desirable qualities and you haven't displayed any yet, and besides I have a self-image as someone who doesn't randomly dump my boyfriend for cute boys I just met. - nonetheless I think when I tell him all that he'll feel insecure and you being there won't help."

"I don't want you to dump your boyfriend for me," Jean says, brightly, ego adequately flattered. "I'm sure he's a lovely man. Might I trouble you to direct me to the nearest shuttle station before I'm on my way?"

"Shuttle station? I don't - know if - I guess there's, like, Florida, where they launch the shuttles from? Is that what you mean?"

"--that sounds fine. How do I get to Florida?"

"Well, usually you'd buy a plane ticket. Or if you don't have any money I guess you could - hitchhike?"

"--sorry, where does money come into it?"

Maybe ... someone who works at the shuttle station is a collector and can be bribed into letting people cut in line???

"Well, to buy the plane ticket."

"To buy -- excuse me, what year is it?"

They give the answer for 2009, but in the Julian calendar.