4:30am wake-up call

Picture this: you're in your bed at 4:30am fast asleep when the fire alarm goes off; you think 'ah sod this' and you bumble out of bed to go to the 'safety point' to wait for all the excitement to end so you can get back to sleep. It's happened to most of us, halls at university springs to mind or when your at a hotel. But this crap happened to me this morning and I was actually panicking a bit because it's twice as bad being a foreigner in Korea.

So, I hear the alarm and it does the usual ringing sound but in between rings it has some voice informing the building of something in Korean.. A fire alarm is inherently panicky anyway but add this unknown Korean into the mix and you can guess how freaked out I was. So in my dazed state, I was rushing around grabbing clothes and my phone and that and rushing out to leave the building. I peak out into the corridor and I just see a load of Koreans shuffling around and using the elevator, which I don't really think is a good idea in the event of a fire but I was on the 8th floor and half asleep still so I wasn't about to walk it. While in the elevator I just say in a bit of a loud voice 'what's going on?'. Some guy spoke a bit of English and just said 'fire alarm' - no shit, I thought. I stick with him and we make it out onto the street. It doesn't look like there's a fire and it didn't look like many people cared anyway because there must be hundreds of people living in my building and there were like 10 people waiting outside. 'This is a joke..', I thought. It was a bit surreal because I chose to take the obvious things, wallet, phone etc, but some woman came out in her PJs - which didn't really leave much to the imagination - while holding a dog in her arms (Koreans don't really seem to think that dogs can walk and so decide to carry them everywhere like a handbag). Another kid I saw was carrying a musical instrument in a box, which made me think he was either playing it before he came outside or thought that it was the most valuable thing he had so he grabbed it. The former wouldn't surprise me..

Anyway, I managed to work out what the bloke I was 'with' was telling me which was that we had to stay outside until the fire brigade came but after 2 minutes the woman with the dog walked back inside and apparently this was good enough for him to think that 'the coast was clear' - I'm not sure whether she had any experience in the fire service or not but he seemed to value her opinion high enough to follow her into what could've been a burning building, so, naturally, I followed him. I got into bed as quickly as I could and I actually dreamt of being outside when the fire alarm went off again. Weirdest fire alarm ever.