Your sex is on fire. Oh no, wait ... that's your flat.

So, if any of you have been stalking me on Facebook in the last couple of days you'll know that something quite scary happened yesterday - definitely blog-worthy!

There we all were, me, Mel and Helen in our room and Pat in his, dutifully doing our TD work. Patrick heard fire engines outside and looked out of the window (his room looks out onto the quays). A woman on the other side of the room started waving at him and shouting "Descendez! Descendez!" (for non-Frenchies, the literal translation of that is get the fuck out). Then he looked down and there were two fire engines outside our house and quite a lot of smoke! The three of us obvs had no idea by this point, until Patrick shouted "Girls, there's a fire in our building, get out!" I'll be honest, for a second I thought he was joking but from the tone of his voice it was pretty obvious he wasn't. So we all grabbed bags, put shoes on etc - I even thought to save my TD work on my laptop! Sadly, Helen struggled to put her shoes on whilst simultaneously performing the all-important task of checking her text messages in the face of death ........... and that was the last we saw of her :(

JOKES! She did however take a VERY long time faffing with her shoes and locking the door despite me shouting "Helen, don't lock the door just get the fuck out!" Anyway, we obviously had to evacuate so we ran downstairs, knocking on doors on the way and stuff. Then followed a VERY LONG TIME waiting outside in the cold behind red and white tape cordoning off the area, watching firemen put the fire out, with no one telling us what was going on. It became clear though that there had been an electrical fire in the basement of the building, underneath the shop that the proprietor owns on the first floor of the building.

Eventually we got fed up of waiting and not knowing anything and went to get some food. When we came back there were still firemen there - in fact, three fire engines, two police vans and two ERDF energy vans! The proprietor was there as well - that was the first time we'd actually met her and she was really lovely, even gave us an English handshake rather than the typical French cheek kisses. She basically told us what had gone on and said we couldn't sleep there tonight. Obviously though we didn't have anything with us so we asked a fireman if we could go up to the flat quickly to get more things for the night. He took us up with him - obviously there was no electricity so it was pitch black but it was SO smokey and the smell was disgusting - that really acrid burning plastic smell but worse! So we ran around grabbing overnight stuff and once we were out we phoned the Sheffield girls and asked if we could go round there.

Patrick went back to his room in halls for the night, and the three of us stayed with the Sheffield girls - it's actually really lovely to know that in case of emergency we have got friends who will always let us stay with them! So yeah ... and now, we're not really sure what's going on. We're waiting to hear from the proprietor about when we can go back properly but not sure if we'll be able to stay there tonight, and even if we can, when we'll have electricity, gas and hot water back.

So yeah! There you go. I thought it was definitely something worth blogging about! In other news ... there isn't really any other news. Less than two weeks till I'm back home now and I really can't wait. It's our last week of lectures, then we have one week pretty much free to go to the Christmas market (which is beautiful), shop, ice skate, admire the Christmas lights... and start some revision!