Frightening moments

This past Thursday I witnessed an unexpected, scary happening, a bit too close for comfort.  

While at the office, in the midst of a discussion related to work, I happened to notice from the window I was facing, a puff of smoke across the street. My coworker and I approached our window out of curiosity and, practically within seconds, we were facing a fire that was engulfing an entire café, which is a popular spot with young people in our area.  

Made entirely of wood, and surrounded by very tall trees that reached the height of the 7th floor of an attached apartment building, the fire took off with raging force producing massive amount of very dense and black smoke, while the flames quickly enwrapped the tree trunks upward.  Rushing out of the place some young customers began to push away some of the cars parked in front, and some bystanders and others began to fill our yard to get away from the heat.  

Having been involved and affected personally, decades ago, by a fire that developed next door to me, and completely destroyed my apartment in NY and all its content, while watching this fire across the street in Tirana, I was reliving frightening moments of the past, and I fretted to see the firefighters’ arrival.  They did eventually show up and began to douse the fire, producing additional clouds of smoke that permeated the entire neighborhood while the wind blew away from the area particles of burned wood that landed also in our yard. 

Needless to say, the pandemonium attracted lots of attention from the neighboring buildings with tenants watching the on-goings from their balconies and eventually the press also stepped into this momentarily chaotic situation.  To my knowledge, fortunately, there were no casualties, but a nearby school was also affected and destroyed.  

We temporarily lost water and electricity, but, thanks to cell phones we contacted the people we were expecting and got them inside our offices where our planned meeting finally took place. Too much unwelcome excitement for one day!