An exciting night at the McCompound

This is the second time I've heard the fire alarm in the middle of the night here. The good news is this time I didn't try to turn it off and set off my burglar alarm instead. The bad news is it was a real fire.

I almost didn't get out of bed. I didn't smell anything but when I heard the neighbor upstairs scream, I thought I should check the hall anyway and sure enough there was smoke this time. So I threw on my clothes and grabbed the four most important things in the house. My laptop, my camera, my purse and my passport and headed for the sidewalk. As it turned out the fire was on the wall in the stairwell, which happened to be the outside wall of my kitchen. For the first time I was really glad I don't have a gas stove.


By the time I got to the stairs some kid with an extinguisher had already put it out. Ironically, it was the fire alarm box that caught fire. This is what's left of it.


The fire department is really good here. I'm amazed at how many trucks and fireman we have. Half of them were trooping through my apartment to make sure it wasn't going to ignite. I tried to get more photos but apparently the reflective tape on their coats screws up the exposure and I only managed to get this one shot.


There were all so cute. I got to chat them up for a long time since I was the last one they let back into the building. And it was good I couldn't fall asleep right away because the fire marshall showed up 20 minutes later to take one last look at my wall.

Anyway, nothing really bad happened except my apartment was vaguely smoky because they had the door open. Took an hour in the freezing night to air it out again. But no big damage, no one was hurt and I got to see what my neighbors looked like. Some of them for the first time. So there's that.