Today was very much on the strange side. I wish i had pictures to prove what i’m about to tell you, but in the moment i wasn’t too concerned about pictures… i was concerned about survival.

Problem 1: I went to a friends apartment to film her Chinese language learning session for a project i’m working on. All morning the weather was looking fairly threatening and sure enough, as soon as i walked into her 9th floor apartment the bottom fell out of the sky. I have never seen such heavy rains in Beijing. Then, about 30 minutes later the skies turned black. I don’t mean like it was a little dark because the storm was rolling in, i mean like if you didn’t have a watch on you would think it was 8:30 at night. It was very very dark outside. Did i mention we were on the 9th floor? Then the thunder and lightning came. The lightning was so close and the thunder was so loud i was waiting for a bolt to come crashing through the window. Did i mention we were on the 9th floor.

Problem 2: The rain finally let up so we decided to go out for lunch. We grabbed our umbrellas and out we went. We got in the elevator and were making our way down when suddenly all the lights began to flicker, the elevator jolted a few times and the whole thing came to a sudden halt. We were stuck. And we were between floors. Luckily, my friend had a flashlight and that helped a little. We yelled through the cracks in the door until about 20 minutes later someone finally came to open the doors and let us out. I later found out that this type of elevator rescue effort is extremely dangerous. I won’t share with you the gruesome story that i was told, but let’s just say that if i ever get stuck in an elevator again i’m just going to wait it out instead of risking my life to crawl out.

End of story time. Again, i don’t have pictures to prove that either of these events actually occurred. But trust me… it happened. And i’m lucky to be alive.