Last night I was awoken by someone ringing my bell and banging on my door as though the world were coming to an end. It was about 2.30am and I had that initial 30 second process of thinking it was a dream and then realising that the noise was real. Then I got a bit scared because someone banging loudly on my door like that means there's either a big emergency or someone is very angry. Which is the more likely scenario? Well, in this case, I noticed tiny reflected bits of blue light flashing near my window and I realised that this might mean the former instead of the latter. The only slight problem in all this was that I wasn't wearing anything.
The evenings and late nights in Prague have been very hot lately, plus I was probably already experiencing some hormonal fluctuations that could raise my temperature. (No, not the menopause - I'm not that old. At least, not yet.) Thus, I had been sleeping naked. Is that slutty? Is it uncouth? Or just sheer laziness? Either way, I suddenly felt rather vulnerable. There's nothing worse than the thought of big, burly firemen breaking down my door while I'm standing there starkers desperately scrabbling around for where I might've put my dressing gown. Mind you, the thought of the irony of the building burning down now that I've got 3/4 of my stuff out of here because I'm moving out in three days did kind of make me smile in a totally 'back of my mind and only requiring 3% of my attention' kind of way.
I took a look out of the window and saw a fire truck and a police car ("oh dear, that means it's potentially quite serious," ran through my head...) and I finally found my dressing gown and put on some knickers and opened my flat door to see what kind of situation we were dealing with. There was no-one there. But there was a distinct smell of smoke. And a fuzziness to the black of the night. In a stroke of spectacularly bad timing, the hallway lights have recently stopped working so the only way to see your way down the stairs is to take your mobile with you and hold it like a torch to see the stairs, so it wouldn't be a case of a quick dash outside. On the other hand, that also meant I couldn't see much to tell if it was a serious fire or not. I couldn't see any flames. Which was a good start.
Nonetheless, I felt pretty scared from the shock of being woken up so rudely and the fire truck outside looking so ominous, so I went into panic mode, grabbed and put on some proper clothes, which turned out to be a pair of leggings and a top and then the dressing gown on top because I still couldn't find any jumpers and my long coats are in the cowboy's flat now already, and put on some shoes, grabbed my handbag and ventured out of my flat (locking the door behind me - why did I do that?) and used my mobile to see my way down. I didn't encounter anyone on the stairs (thank god, because I didn't really fancy trying to talk to a bunch of old ladies in my dressing gown, asking in Czech if it was serious or not having had a sum total of 2 and a half hours' sleep) and I couldn't see any kind of flames, definite source of smoke or, for that matter, any burly firemen. (Sod it, I know I should say, "firefighters" but this is the Czech Republic and one thing they do really well is sexism, so there really weren't going to be any firewomen and if there's a f**king fire, then, quite frankly, I'm past caring about being PC.)
I got as far as the ground floor and looked out of the windows and saw a few strands of mobile phone light to accompany mine in the distance but nothing else. Still no discernible smoke source and only faint, hazy smoke inside. There were no loudspeaker announcements, no hurried rush of inhabitants and above all, no fire. So I kind of decided not to bother wandering outside to talk to the firemen and or residents because I must've looked frightful anyway and I had had enough of this stupid drama. I decided that if it were serious, there would have been someone shouting, 'get out' (in Czech) by now. And there hadn't been. And nothing had escalated into major drama in the time it had taken me to get dressed and figure out what on earth to do, so it couldn't be that serious anyway.
So I just went back upstairs. I looked out the window again to see how things were progressing with the fire truck, but there were no firemen rushing in with hoses and no queue of residents lining up from what I could see, and as the police car drove off, I realised this was probably all some kind of over-reaction from a little old lady who'd smelt smoke and panicked. I also realised how utterly rubbish I was at reacting sensibly and calmly under these circumstances. I'd had the sense to throw on some clothes (by then it was infact a little bit chilly outside) and take my handbag with me, but where was my sensible reaction of grabbing my laptop and harddrive?! Good god, what was wrong with me? I would have lost everything without those two items. My brain had totally shut down on that front and I had wasted precious seconds wondering where my nightie that I hadn't even been wearing was.
I suppose that's where the firefighters would have actually helped if we had really been in danger as they'd've told us all to grab a coat and get out and then I could blame them for not giving me time to think to get my laptop. Which I now know, that on 2 and a half hours' sleep I didn't even manage independently, with a fair amount of time. Thank god I didn't bump into anyone though. I'd've felt so stupid. It's kind of funny, I suppose, how much scarier everything feels at 2.30am when you're in a foreign country and don't even know how an evacuation procedure would be worded. I still feel embarrassed at the idea of being sleepily undressed and wandering about looking for knickers like some floozy when at any moment a uniformed Czech guy could have been about to ram down my door. Especially as just across the road there are people getting paid for that kind of thing as part of a night's work.
