We didn’t start the fire!

I am waiting to get some pictures back from some friends of Alexandria to get caught up on the blog. I had my camera but I dropped it outside of the museum which was the first thing we did so the other pictures I took early on were not saved, so look for that post coming soon along with about three others I have already written, but I wanted to stay in order so they made sense. In the mean time I wanted to share a quick story about my hotel catching fire. I awoke to the fire alarm going off at around 2am the other morning and thought it might just be some false alarm…I was wrong. I waited a few minutes and decided to get out of bed to see what was going on and so I threw on some clothes and stepped out to the hall way. As soon as I opened the door I could smell smoke! Another guy walked out of his room and we both kind of looked at each other and then plugged our noses. Regardless of what language you speak that’s a pretty good sign to use when something stinks and we both looked down the stairway shaft to see a thin cloud or haze of smoke a few stories down with people running down the stairs. So if the fire alarm wasn’t enough to tell me to get out of there the people running for their lives were and I followed suit, but not without packing up my computer.

So I ran down the stairs and when I got down to about the 4th flour the smoke was pretty bad and I had to cover my mouth because the air was hard to breath. I got out into the street and saw the first responders on the scene. It was a guy standing on the top of a car with a fire extinguisher trying to spray inside the window of the room with the fire. I wish I would have taken a picture of that but the fire department showed up soon after. There was smoke coming out of the window in the second floor and it turned out that it was coming from the bank which shared the building with us. So with everyone in the street and about 6 fire trucks lined up, Egypt’s finest went to go handle business. This whole ordeal took about an hour of going down in the street, the fired dept showing up, putting out the fire, and waiting for the smoke to clear to go back in our rooms. The pictures that you see below are really bad because it looks like the building is blowing up, but I assure you those are the lights from the trucks. The fire that I saw was just a lot of smoke and I heard the fire dept breaking glass and hacking at the room, but it wasn’t all that bad, it just makes for one more story to add to the experience.

The Smoke was coming out on that first row of windows above the first truck