Friday Night Excitment

I had a memorable Friday night experience on July 4, 2008.

The old section of town, Barrio Antiguo, is known as the area for nightlife. There are some really nice places that we sometimes go to. One of which is called Akbal. It's a cool place with a lot of nice stuff on the walls and ceilings (chandeliers and such) but no cover and good prices. We're there for a few hours and it gets to be about 2:30 so we ask for the check (there were 6 of us). We are also on a patio on the second floor.

All of a sudden one of the servers opens the door to the inside and tells everyone to come inside and be quite. Puzzled, I ask why we need to keep quite to a friend and he says he doesn't know, perhaps because of the police. So I'm wondering...is the bar doing something illegal that we didn't know about? Is there a noise complaint for the bar? Is that even possible? Also, Friday was the day that my visa expired, so if cops are involved, I'm wondering how long I'll be in jail.

So we go inside and we sit down on a couch and I start to tell myself that worrying is only going to cloud my thinking, so I start looking around trying to find out what is going on. After a few minutes, there is a loud crash from downstairs, some people scream, and a server runs up the stairs and tells us all to get against one of the walls. At this point I'm sure that the SWAT team has just busted out the barricaded door and the bar workers are trying to prepare us for a search. But this thought lasts only for a few seconds as I immediately recognize the smell of Kerosene, and it's thick in the air. I mention this to my friends and step away from the wall looking for a way out. Just then two servers run up the stairs with fire extinguishers, and even before they said a word I had put my shirt over my mouth and headed for the stairs. Sure enough they told everyone to exit the building as quickly and as calmly as possible. I was the third person down the stairs, being very selfish and expecting that everyone would make it behind me.

The downstairs was quite smoky, but I could tell that there was not a fire in the immediate area. As I stepped into the street, I looked at the neighboring restaurant and saw smoke pouring out of the windows that had been broken in the explosion (the crashing noise from earlier) and saw a faint reddish light inside. There were only pedestrians on the street, no cops or firefighters. I met up with the rest of the group (I found it humorous that all the girls were coughing loudly because their outfits didn't provide any clothing for covering the airways for smoke avoidance). Two of the girls were freaking out and said we had to get out of there immediately. My hand was grabbed and we literally ran to the nearest taxi.

I have no idea what happened to the building or how big the fire actually was. What I do know is that we each got a few free drinks from the excitement!

Also, if you are keeping up with photos, there are several new ones. "Photographs of Monterrey 2," "Visits to Rural Mexico 2," and "Studio Project Context" have been updated, while "Photographs of Monterrey 3," "We Climbed a Mountain," and "The Day there was Rain in the Desert" are all new.