After getting lost while on a bus, Filipino woman vowed to learn French and now teaches others

During the summer of 2006, Leonora Laput hopped onto a Quebec City transit bus to explore her new home.

The old buildings, lush trees and distant mountains along the route — scenery uncharacteristic of her native Philippines— excited her, until she clued in that she was lost.

“I didn’t realize that I was already at Val-Bélair,” said Laput, who had ridden all the way to a suburb north of the Jean Lesage International Airport. “The bus reached the end of the route where everybody goes off, and so that’s when I got off, too.”

The only French verb Laput knew at the time was perdre, meaning to lose. So,