The kind of embarrassing moment every exchange student hopes they don't have, but they inevitably do....

 On the upside, my embarrassing moment took place during a time which I was completely alone. On the downside, that was the reason why the moment became even took place. These past couple of weeks are what are called “Vorabis” Vorabis are like midterms, only on steroids. They are all six hours long... yep... six hours of writing and scrambling your brain looking for that one answer. Sounds pretty horrible to me, and that's why, holding the lucky position of “already graduated” exchange student, I opted out. Haha. Anyway, that means that once or twice a week I have no school. Last Friday this was the case. It also happened to be a day where the housemaid Manja began her vacation. That meant that I got to spend until lunchtime alone in the house. Honestly, as an exchange student, true alone time tends to be nonexistent. I believe that most of cherish these short hours alone where we can truly unwind and relax. I like it because I can do things that I do in my own home, like going barefoot and staying in my Pj's until noon. Unfortunately at eleven, as I was sitting upstairs putting the final touches on my college applications, the doorbell rang. Now, most houses in Germany have a speaker system and a buzzing system built into the house so that you don't have to run to the door, and my house especially. My house is HUGE. The bottom floor is a two-car garage, the washroom, the storage room, a doctor's practice, and my host father's dentist practice. Yes, really. We live on the second, third, and fourth floors. The entrance, however is on the first floor. You then walk up a flight of stairs, through a door, across an open corridor, through another door, into the mudroom, and then through the front door. Complicated, I know. It's even more complicated when you don;t know how to buzz someone in, and in your comfy short-shorts Pj's. So I scramble and pull on a pair of pants and run. I run downstairs and then through all of those doors. By the time I get there, no one is there. “Okay,” I think, “Cool. Just saved myself some major embarrassment. No one will see me like this afte rall.” I then walk up the stairs and look. Every single door shut behind me. I have no phone. No key. I am quasi in my Pj's and I am barefoot. This is getting good, isn't it? As I sit on the steps, I think over my options. I could wait for someone to get home around two. I could walk through the first floor corridor and into the practice and ask for a key. Yep.... That's pretty embarrassing. But there was no way I waiting for someone to get home. So I go down to the corridor and as I'm walking through I peek in the washroom and see a pair of sandals,; I throw those on to preserve a bit of dignity, and then I go to the door to the practice. I stood outside of that door for about ten minutes, putting off the inevitable embarrassment. That;s when another option hit me: Ring on the other resident's doorbell! We also rent a small apartment to an old woman on the second floor. I rang her doorbell, and she answered. The problem was that she had never met me. I explained, and I think my accent mixed with my desperation and the state I was in convinced her that I probably was living in the house. So she let me in, and no one but her would have know if I had remembered to bring the shoes back down to the washroom... shoot... haha.