Unbelievable

I spent my last day in Portugal in Faro, where I couldn’t find much to do besides walk around the small town and look into some shops. There is a beach in Faro but that required getting on a bus across town and I wasn’t really feeling like making the journey.

My flight back to London was leaving at 9:30am and I asked the night clerk at my hostel the easiest way to get to the airport in the morning. The clerk was trying very hard to explain to me that I should take a bus across the street from the but he was struggling to find his words. At first I thought that he was just trying really hard to find the right words in English but after several minutes of him trying to explain it to me I discovered that he had a stammer. I have to give him a lot of credit for taking a job where he has to explain to people how to get places with a speech impediment in a language that he was unsure of.

After a week in Portugal without doing any laundry and only bringing a small carryon bag I was ready to do some laundry. First thing back in my room in London I dumped everything from my suitcase onto the floor and then I stripped down to nothing but my underwear. I was getting ready to put all of this in the washing machine and hop into the shower when I noticed that there was cat hair all over my bed. I had closed my door while I was away but one of my flatmates must have opened the door and the two cats looked like they had had a shedding party on my bed. Everything was covered in cat hair. First I grabbed the two pillows and walked out to the back steps and beat them together to get the hair off. Then I did the same thing with my two sheets and finally went back to get my duvet and shake that out. While shaking out the duvet a gust of wind came up and the back door slammed behind me. I tried to open the door but it was locked!

I was standing on my back stairs wearing nothing but my boxers and holding a duvet at two in the afternoon. Neither of my flatmates usually get home until 6 or 7 at night. I tried the windows without luck. I banged on the window above my flat but the guy who lives there wasn’t home either. I walked around to my front door and tried that door but it was also locked. A woman came walking down the street and saw me and laughed. I was stuck, no keys, no cell phone, with no idea what my flat mates phone numbers were.

On the first floor of my building is a convenience store, so I wrapped my duvet around my waist and walked into the store as a final act of desperation. There was a woman shopping who gave me a once over with her eyes, and shook her head. I went up to the counter where the owner and her son were working and they gave me a look of “What is this guy doing?” I explained that I lived upstairs and had locked myself out and asked if they had a key to the main entrance to my flat. Luckily they did and I was able to get back into my flat without sitting on the street nearly naked for 5 hours. If it had happened in a movie, I wouldn’t have believed that it was possible but apparently it is!