So after that great little bar-b-que that fateful night in December, my dad and sister went back to their hotel and everyone else started heading home. I think the last person left at around 4am. I then turned off all the lights, blew out all the candles, and went to sleep. I only slept for a few hours, though, because at 7am Paolo, my flat mate, ran into my room and told me to get up quickly because he needed help. I jumped out of bed and followed him into the hallway where I was met by a huge cloud of smoke. We ran into the living room and there, in the corner, was a 10-foot flame blazing upward from the television set and along the wall to the ceiling. Immediately I thought, “That damn bar-b-que! Thanks a lot dad!” but it turned out that the flames where nowhere near the thing. We grabbed a few blankets off the clothesline on the patio and began frantically beating the fire into submission while other flat mates threw buckets of water on the base of the flames. It was almost impossible to breathe with all of the smoke and I was standing there with nothing on but a T-shirt and my boxers amongst the broken glass all over the floor. I don’t remember ever being so scared in all my life. That’s why I thought it was rather strange that, while battling this blaze, I found myself wanting to take a picture of the action. You know, for posterity. Ironically enough, it was just then that I noticed my camera melting in front of the television. It took about 15 minutes to put the fire completely out and then we all had to stand outside and wait for the smoke to clear. It was quite a sight: five of us, half-naked, huddled together with our faces almost completely blackened at 8am on a crisp winter’s morning. It was then that our “neighbors from hell” decided to make an appearance. There’s this elderly couple who live next-door and enjoy calling the police to complain that we talk too loud or eat dinner too late. Did they offer to call the fire department? No, they threatened to call the police and file a complaint against us. Did they ask if anyone was hurt? No, I heard one of them mutter, “They probably got drunk and did something.” Thankfully no one got seriously hurt aside from a few minor burns from putting out the fire. We decided to just ignore them while Paolo told us what had happened. Apparently everyone was sleeping when the fire started and our bedrooms are too far from the living room for us to have smelled the smoke. Well, while Paolo was sleeping he heard a loud banging on his bedroom door that woke him up. He tried to turn on the lights but the power had gone out. He picked up his flashlight and opened the door to see what the banging was. Just then our cat, Junio, ran through his door and jumped onto his bed. Junio had been banging on his door. Paolo couldn’t see anything in the hallway because of all of the smoke. When he saw the fire in the living room he came and woke me up. Junio saved us! I don’t want to imagine what would have happened if he wasn’t there. So what caused the fire? We don’t know. We think that the television just exploded on its own in the middle of the night. It sounds very unlikely, but two people I know say that they’d heard of a very similar thing happen and our television set wasn’t exactly new (we had found it in the street and fixed it ourselves). So all of a sudden we were left with no electricity, our nice white walls were all black, and everywhere the smoke reached there was now this black plastic dust: on the ceiling, in the sink, on our food, on our toothbrushes, and in every nook and cranny of the flat. We all sleep with our bedroom doors closed so at least our rooms were spared. The next three weeks were spent cleaning, dusting, rewiring the electricity, removing old paint, sanding, cementing, and throwing stuff out. We even knocked down the wall that was dividing the living room and the kitchen instead of cleaning and repainting it. When it was time to leave on Christmas holiday, we left the flat to a couple of crazy Italians who live upstairs and agreed to repaint the place. Thank goodness I returned after New Year’s to find a flat that was not only livable, but arguably better than the flat that had spontaneously combusted just three weeks earlier.