Escaped from a Burning Building: Check That One Off the Bucket List!

Here's a picture of our building on fire.  We left the light on....

We've been really busy this week with transfers. Well, as you already know, we did escape from a burning building, check that one off the bucket list. It was late Friday night, we were up working on the travel plans for missionaries to follow for transfer week. It has train arrivals, departures, other instructions, etc. We were all at our computers when we heard one of the guards for the building yelling outside. Looking out the window, we saw him yelling into his phone, then 5 stories below us, the flames coming out of the window. We decided we should probably get out, we grabbed our bags, made sure the office safe was closed and went down the stairs. There was quite a bit of smoke on the 2nd and 3rd floors in the stairwell, but we made it out just fine. We were out of the building before any of the fire department showed up. And, we left our cell phone up there too, so we didn't have any way to contact anyone. Eventually a ton of fire trucks showed up and they got everything under control. They clogged up the parking lot, so we couldn't drive our car out. We walked to the other missionaries' house to use their phone to call Pres. Hill and tell him we were alive, and then we walked back to the office building, and that's when all the news reporters were there. They overheard us talking to a lady who works on the 5th floor, and that we were in the building when the fire started, and that's when they all just swarmed around us. Like 20 microphones, 5 or 6 cameras. They didn't even ask us questions, just held the microphones there and didn't say anything. It was really awkward. The fire department got the fire all put out in about an hour. We came in the next morning and there was a layer of soot over everything. But the cleaning company came on Monday and cleaned the whole office (another reason I couldn't email) they shampooed the carpets, cleaned the doors, walls, chairs, everything. The office doesn't smell like smoke anymore, haha. So that's the story of the burning office building. How did you people in Utah find out about it? Amy said it was her friend, but how did her friend find out? I'm really curious. Anyways.

That's by far the most interesting thing that happened in the last little while. On Wednesday, we spent almost 6 hours in the Immigration office waiting in lines and getting new missionaries applied for their visas. That was a long day. Everything went according to plan, for the most part. There's always some sort of hiccup, but we ended 10 for 10, so we called it a success. We have a new senior couple coming in tomorrow, so we've been preparing all of their documents to apply for visas as well. That's about it. Just staying busy getting the mail, washing the cars, getting them inspected, and handling all of the other mission problems.