Stairwell: a story

(Anyone else see The Hobbit yet? Anyone else think that movie is only worth it for the second unit scenery footage.)

Today i saw The Hobbit and ate a great sandwich so instead of telling you about that i figured ill tell a story from earlier this week:

The people I'm staying with gave me a key to their apartment so I can come and go as I please. So on the second night in town I go out to the new film museum. They're playing Vertigo. Good movie but I had trouble staying awake with the slow pace and late screening.

I bike home. It's one if the colder nights in Amsterdam, a little below 30, so the whole time I'm thinking about a warn bed. I get the apartment and open the door into the stairwell. I turn the light on and walk up to the top floor. I put my key in the door, turn and push. The door doesn't budge. I try turning the other way. The same. I try the deadlock and the knob and still nothing. I try all 4 combinations of twists and it gets me no where.

I'm locked out.

Twenty minutes pass as I fiddle with the lock. It's now a quarter past midnight. I know they have to get up for work early but I decide the only thing I can do is wake them. I knock. Louder and louder and louder. I start banging on the door, the bottom of the start case above me, the walls. I just start hitting shit. Nothing.

A half a hour passes. New plan: the buzzer. I go back down the stairs. I find the buzzer for the third floor and push it. I can hear it going off from the bottom if the stairs. Bzzzzzzz! Bzzzzzzzzzzzz! Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! Fifteen minutes. Nothing. Fuck they are seriously asleep!

I go back up stairs to the door. Fifteen more minutes at the locks, ten more minutes bashing the door and its somewhere past 1:30am. I'm exhausted so I look down. What I see is a three by three square of floor in front of the door with a mat that reads "oh not you again!".

The lights are on timers so every couple of minutes they go off. Ten more minutes of knocking and I look down again. It's looking like the only solution. It's edging towards 2am so I would only have to no out here for another 5hrs or so. "I can sleep on the floor for five hours", I justify to myself.

I turn the lights on one last time as I begin to position myself on the landing. My shoes are now pillows. My jacket and sweatshirt are blankets. The welcome may is my bed. I curl up, first leaning in the door, then the wall, then my knees. Damn the floor is cold. I fall into a position with my face on the floor, inches away from the stairs and my feet against the door. I finally fall asleep.

(Fifteen seriously uncomfortable minutes later)

"Fuckin A, this sucks!". I wake up with my face itchy from the welcome mat. Waking up in that position has made me quite alert. The possibility of falling asleep again is slim. I sit up against the wall. My phone can access the wifi from inside the apartment so I put on a podcast and get comfortable. I sit for a good 5hrs in the cold, dark stairwell. Listening to movie podcasts and waiting. By the time my shirtless host found me I must have looked like a caged animal seeing light for the first time in days. Pale, clothing all over, visibly in pain, shielding the doorway light from my eyes, I might have hissed at him I can't remember. I know I looked bad enough that the first word he said to me were "are you okay?".

I go inside and zombie my way to my room. His wife brings me a heating pack and places it in my bed. I slip under the blissfully warm blankets and sleep all the way till 4pm. By far the most satisfying night of rest I've had all trip.

So that's my "sleeping in the stairwell story". Hope you enjoyed it! Join me next time when I go to a sex show with Scott and get arrested for pissing off the top of a castle in Bruges.