A drunken birthday to remember
Today I’m going to write about a story of how a group of friends and I managed to get stuck in a lift in a foreign country at 5am in the morning.
It was October of 2010 and I was in Hong Kong celebrating my 21st birthday at the Beijing club in Central, Hong Kong.
From the vague memories of the actual club I remember it to have been $300HKD for guys and $100 for girls, with an open bar all night. Clubs in Hong Kong often charge over the top prices, mainly because of demand for entrance and limited clubs and space in a highly populated city. They can often be a lot stricter than clubs in England when letting in groups of guys, so if you can help it; always make sure you have a couple of girls with you.
Needless to say, an open bar on a night out usually ends in a mess, so on your birthday; you can imagine how much I wanted to stop the taxi on the way home and heave my guts out. It was one of those moments where I managed the entire half an hour taxi journey back, only to decide that it would be nice to colour in the back seats in puke just as I were getting out.
So with my wallet a couple hundred bucks lighter, and my stomach also considerably lighter the plan was to get back to the flat and continue our drinking session, although everyone deep down knew that they would crash out as soon as they hit a bed (or even a moderately flat surface). All 9 of us crammed into the lift, clearly marked as a maximum of 4 people…It seemed like a good time saving idea at the time, but hey - you live you learn.
Anyone who has ever been to an Asian country knows that lifts are very common, mainly because of the tall buildings, they have to squish everyone together. Therefore a lot of the lifts are cranky and very old.
This particular lift was no exception, our flat was on the 7th floor, and as we watched the floor-dial slowly grind to a halt halfway between floors 6 and 7 we knew it was jammed, the occasional shuddering did not help one bit, as we felt sure the lift was going to come crashing down at any minute.
Now when you are blind drunk, crammed into a 4 man lift with 9 people sweating from the intense heat and gasping for air, believing you are going to die is a very stressful and real thing indeed. We repeated pressed the emergency button praying someone would come and rescue us.
Half an hour later the understandably grumpy building guard wrenched open the door and we climbed out of the lift: WHILE THE LIFT WAS STILL INBETWEEN FLOOR 6 AND 7.
(Please note that this isn’t actually us! I was way too drunk to get a photo. Credits, Google)
This was some serious final destination shit, if the lift had suddenly started working I would have been chopped in half (the guard didn’t seem to care – oh well).
(A Final Destination death scene - Google at your own peril)
Eventually however we all managed to clamber out and believe it or not, there was no round 3 of drinking back at the flat. I’m even pretty sure I fell asleep before I hit the mattress. In regards to the building guard, I did buy him a box of biscuits the next day to make up for our drunken mischief that night.