Epicness!

So here’s the scenario.
Saturday evening. Ollie and I go to visit the girls’ apartment, and Jack, Anna and Francesca are already there with Camilla and Erin. Jack goes upstairs with the key and comes back, then Steve comes down. Ollie and I want to go upstairs to get something, and Jack has a horrible realisation: he had walked out of the apartment without the key. Steve hadn’t picked it up either. So yes, for the first time this year, and possibly for the first time in the Dresden gapper history, I was locked out of my apartment!

I felt pretty awful at first. Ollie and I tried ringing both neighbours’ bells to ask about climbing from their balcony to mine, but neither answered the door. I rang the lady who inspects our apartments but she told me the key she uses actually lives in the office of the principal and deputy principal. Since it was a Saturday evening, she couldn’t do anything about it and suggested we try sleeping in the girls’ flat.

By the way, I had come downstairs without any shoes, or my bag, which includes my wallet, all my money, my tram ticket and a whole lot of other useful stuff. Ollie didn’t have any shoes either. We had been contemplating going out clubbing but decided to just drink and have fun at home. We were joined by Chloe, another Australian girl who lives in Dresden, to make it 9 people in total! After much drinking, six of us headed to the main station with the crazy idea of taking a train in the middle of the night to Berlin or somewhere, but there were no trains apart from S-Bahns so Chloe said we’d take trams to Kleinschachwitz where she lives and go swimming in a lake.

Were we up for it?

Hell yes we were.

On the tram, we spoke far too loudly and drunkenly and Steve and I ended up having a time-trial running all the way down to the end of the tram and back to our seat. We got off at the end of the line and walked a really long way before getting to this lake, and despite the alcohol in our systems, it started looking like less of a good idea! Nevertheless, Ollie instantly took off everything and jumped in. The rest of us left underwear on and got in cautiously, then I went under to try and get used to the freezing temperature and Ollie, Anna and I had a bit of a swim around.

We spotted a campfire further up the lake and once we’d all got out and got dry, we went to investigate. It was a big group of Germans celebrating an 18th birthday. They invited us to join them and so we warmed up by this fire and chatted to them. There was a guitar that I played a bit, doing some songs with Ollie, and we also had some food heated in the fire and some drinks. We had the best time ever. Basically, we spent the remainder of the night there – and I mean without sleeping! The sun came up extremely quickly at like 6, then at like 8 the people who were left started packing up. Camilla had already left and Chloe went back to her house in Kleinschachwitz so it was Ollie, Steve, Anna and I who walked a hugely long way, Steve and I barefoot and Ollie borrowing Camilla’s thongs, then caught a tram (without tickets, apart from Anna) back home. We were entirely tripping out on the fact that we hadn’t slept. Ollie and I just kept recalling what we’d done and laughing hysterically in the tram, Steve was kind of dozing off and Anna was sitting far away from us to save the apparent embarrassment of being with us!

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the key back on Sunday either, and was told that I’d have to organise for somebody to get the key out of the office when the kindergarten opened on Monday, and bring it to me in the girls’ flat. I couldn’t exactly go and do it myself because I had no tram ticket and no shoes, plus I’d been wearing the same clothes for the last two days and felt quite scummy.

So through the magic of alcohol, we turned a bad situation into the most fun we ever had. (imagine that as the happy-ever-after ending of a children's story book, read in a really soothing voice. Fun times!)