Yes Beyonce, Ring the Alarm

This morning, Jordan and I were sleeping peacefully in our little European bed when all of a sudden, all hell broke loose.  The most ear-peircing, shrieking, awful alarm began blaring all throughout our little flat.  I was so disoriented, I had no idea what was going on.  Jordan had set the alarm to go to swim practice this morning so I started hitting the alarm trying to make it stop shrilling in my ear. When I realized it wasn't the alarm, I yelled "Jordan, we are under attack!!" Jordan, the scholar, realized very quickly what it really was.  He looked at me and said "Katie, it's the fire alarm!"  Fear took over my body, I quickly envisioned our first little home burnt to the ground. (Apparently, I am very irrational in the morning) We have been lighting lots of candles in our flat and I thought for sure we had left one candle burning and now the rest of our house was on fire.  We shot out of bed, threw our boots on, frantically yelled about what to grab (to quickly realize we have nothing of value here) Jordan grabbed his wallet and we sprinted out of our bedroom.  I couldn't even make myself look into the living room as we ran past it because I didn't want to see it in flames.  We flew open the door to freedom, stumbled up our stairs, our hearts pounding to find five other neighbors all in their pajamas, and the Landlord yelling "THIS IS JUST A DRILL"

 what?!?!!! No one gave us the heads up that they have those here. I felt like we had just gotten pranked, or it was our initiation into British society or something.

After ten minutes, all of our neighbors finally stumbled out of bed and made it outside which we were told was an unacceptable response time.   I'm really hoping that doesn't mean they are going to try and "test" our response time again.  At least the next time, I will know we are not under attack and that it is just a drill. After our brisk morning, we came back inside to our non-charred flat and couldn't go back to sleep because we kept laughing about what had just happened.  What a great way to rise and shine!