The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire

In the case of knowing what to do in the case of emergency, I felt my wits being tested as Prof. Reis banged at our hotel door close to midnight screaming "There is a fire on the second floor, call the front desk". Thinking that that the hotel's roof was about to collapse on top of my head, I ran out of my room in my nighty grabbing my purse, airline tickets and cell phone. My roommate Michele was frantic throwing her punk hoodies into her king sized duffle bag.
My other roommate, Erica was quick to respond as she and I remained in the hallway trying to imagine what was exactly happening upstairs. The alerts to our other neighbors was quick as us Americans were screaming "Oh, my god, you have to be f**king kidding me".
Our next door neighbor was a middle-aged woman, who spoke nothing but Porteguese, in my attempt to explain the details in Spanish, all I could think about was my clothes. In that second, Meg appears with her laptop briefcase, and designer shoes and clothes sloppily thrown in her bag. She made me laugh as she said she was going to try to save her clothes by throwing it over the balcolny.
In the end, our true saviors were Vince and Grant, whose heroic efforts of combating the fire with no experience whatsoever of handling a fire extinguisher, proved to save the day. In all there were no deaths or injuries, with little damage done to the hotel itself.
Being in a different country, requires more than just a drinking experience it requires understanding of the people and language in order to run smoothly. I say this because the woman next door who didn't speak english looked so scared and I tried to calm her down.
Our feelings and emotions our universal and only til you can't communicate can you understand that we are all the same, but just have different experiences based upon where we live.