Exploding refrigerators

So Wednesday evening, I went to my choir class at the university at 6 PM. When I entered the building, I showed my pass to the lady at the front desk

(Now let me first tell you about these passes... I got back to Blagoveshchensk on April 14, and on April 15, I started back at the university. As I walked into the university that morning and started to walk though the turnstile, a big, calloused hand hit me in the chest and stopped me in my tracks. "Pass" said the big security guard in military uniform whose hand had just stopped me. "What pass?" I said, a little annoyed, as I was already late coming in. "Your student pass. You need a pass to get in."

"Listen," I said, "I've been coming here every day for the last seven months and no one has ever asked me for a pass before!" (Plus I don't have a pass or any kind of student ID from the university). He just pointed to a notice on the wall next to the entrance. I read it. "Starting April 15, all students will be required to show their student passes to gain admittance to the building." Oh crap. Well today was April 15, and I didn't have a pass. "I was out of town for a month," I explained, "but I could call my teacher and have her explain that I'm a student here." And I started to pull out my phone, but by this time I was already holding up a line of people behind me, and he just said "Go, go... but get a pass as soon as you can!" So I got through, and asked my teacher about getting one, but she said that it would take a few days. Apparently, they started requiring passes because of the terrorist bombings in the Moscow metro that happened while I was in Moscow. So for the next few days while I was waiting for my pass to be done, I got in the building either whenever one of my friends working as entrance security, letting me though with a handshake and a "privyet", or by one of my friends seeing me in the entrance lobby and ushering me though, saying that I am a student, despite the protests of the old lady that sits in the booth at the turnstile.)

So anyway, I went to the university for my music class on Wednesday at six o'clock, and as I was walking through the turnstile, flashed my pass at the old lady in the booth. "You don’t need to show me your pass..." she said. "Thank God that we don't have to go through that hassle anymore" I thought. She continued "... because they cancelled all the classes because of the fire. There's nowhere for you to go." "What?!" I exclaimed, "what happened?" "There was a fire here a little earlier. Now go home!“ she ordered me with her stern old-lady voice. She wasn’t going to tell me any details, so I just left and walked back home. When I arrived the next day, all of the floors, walls, chairs, and desks in my corpus were covered with a layer of black soot, none of the lights were working, and there was the lingering smell of smoke in the hallways. I learned that on the second floor, in one of the labs, a refrigerator filled with chemicals caught on fire and exploded. It blew out a couple windows, covered everything in soot, and knocked out some of the electricity, but no one was hurt and only one or two rooms were damaged (thanks to, in part, the fact that the whole building is basically built of 2 foot thick layers of concrete).

The next morning there were brigades of students armed with buckets of water, rags, and bright yellow plastic gloves roaming the sooty halls, trying to clean everything up. It was an interesting experience, the result of which our teacher decided to conduct class out on the street, which meant that we walked around the city and talked in Russian for a few hours.