Our weekend sucked part 1

Now my blog had became a bit tame, but wait till you hear this;

As we had heard from Joel things at the hostel weren't working out at all and he had had horrible days working and cooking and cleaning for 30 ppl without ever having had a training, I picked him up from Rotterdam CS this Saturday afternoon.
Luckily the hostel he spoke to in Utrecht, could welcome him earlier, but he just needed a place to stay the few days in between.

Thing is, our cellar exploded that night.

I was just laying in bed, R. was at the toilet when we heard a loud bang.
now we had heard fireworks from the World Port Days all evening, but this did sound a little different and it seemed the house shook too.

R. went downstairs, saw smoke coming from the dishwasher and out of all the kitchen cabinets and soon discovered something was terribly wrong in the cellar.
I had by then unlocked and opened the front door so we could run out easily, went upstairs to shout to Joel something was wrong, put on a bathrobe (made a mental note to start sleaping in pj's), ran upstairs to the boys room where M. had just woken up from all the noise.
As we went downstairs, R. came up again to get T. (he had allready put C. on the street who was picked up by Joel) and we all ran downstairs.
Between us getting up and running downstairs, the smoke had become so thick, we could hardly see anymore and had trouble breathing !!
This is also a very urgent plea for anybody reading to install smoke alarms. Sure will be one of the first things we're going to do.

Anyway, we were outside, R. had been back once to get my cell phone (coz we had had short circuit also) and bag and i ran to the cafe on the corner to yell at them to call 112 (Dutch equivalent of 911) and r. pulled the door behind him.
In fact we were sort of waiting for another explosion to blow out the windows.
it was weird to say the least.

Firemen and police arrived at the same time and after they slammed the door open and went in, R. stayed there and I went over to the cafe were 3 dazed children were being served cokes and where a very considerate police man brought over 3 teddy bears.
Which was really great coz their normal ducks (anyone knowing us, understands what a crucial role the ducks play in getting our children to go to bed) smelled terrible from the smoke.

To make a long story a bit shorter; the firemen think it may be caused by a wet piece of cloth that was used to clean and wax one of the closests. Apparently that can brew and stir a spontaneous fire.
I have my doubts.
I mean we have been living there for almost 7 yrs now, why would this suddenly happen?
Not that I have any idea about what did happen , but ...
Still if they think that's it, that is it.

At about 2 the kids were hyper from the sugar in the cokes and i took them to a hotel. I just picked the nearest one that could have 6 persons but everyone in the pub warned me it was some sort of a junkieplace.
Now if you knew the cafe and the people in it and they would tell you it was a junkie place, you would be as troubled as i was.
I told Joel I would check the place out and if i didnt trust it we would move on.
The doorman was a bit typical but we were all in desperate need of a place to stay so we went in.
It wasnot that bad.
I mean the 3 of us had to stay in one (double) bed, R, had a double bed with another kid and Joel had a spare room so at least we had a roof over our head. I did see immediately that we didn't have any towels but that was for later.
R. was allowed to go back in the house once to pick some clothes, medicines, whatever for the first night in a bag (everything smelling awful) and bring that over, some people allready came to take the tv, stereoset, computer and stuff to clean that and he came over to the hotel at about 3.30 am. By that time the kids were just asleep and we tried to get some rest too.

At 7 the boys were awake as if nothing had happened and we started a brand new day