Comedy or tragedy?

This is the question we're asking ourselves at the moment. It is currently 10:48pm on New Year's Eve and we're settling in for our first night in Rome. Well, when I say 'settling', we're trying to at least. The last hour or so has been a series of unfortunate events - the likes of which will be retold for years, I'm sure.

We got home at about 9:45 and tried to let ourselves into the apartment, only to find that the key wouldn't turn in the front door lock. So we tried the other key. And the other lock. And turning it in the opposite direction. And every combination and permutation of the above. This continued rather un-humourously for around ten minutes until we finally gave in and called the accommodation contact who, despite saying she'd be there in 'a few minutes', arrived after about twenty minutes. She tried exactly what we'd been trying, and after a minute of this proved to her it wasn't just something we were doing wrong, she took both sets of keys, jumped in the elevator and left without any further explanation. Naturally we were a little perturbed by this, not knowing what she was doing, but she did appear again a couple of minutes later with a can of WD-40. Some spraying and jiggling of the door later and we were in. We WD-40ed the living daylights out of the bolts and established how to stop another lockout, and she was off again.

So we breathed a sigh of relief, turned the heaters on to warm the place up a bit and started making some coffee, glad those particular events of the evening were over. At which point, the power blew. We were plunged suddenly into darkness and having to delve through the metaphorical darkness of our collected memories to see if we could recall where the fuse box was. We found it, turned the power back on, and now I sit here relaying the story.

If this isn't an eventful end to 2012, I don't know what is. One hour to go.

Happy New Year!

Alison