"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein

Travelling across Europe, sleeping in student hostels along the way, you get to meet all sorts of people.

One such person, for simplicity's sake, we will refer to simply as Bert. We met Bert in our hostel in Prague, as we were making use of the free internet in the common space. He ran in from the kitchen with a panicked look, asking "Have you guys had any trouble with the pitcher... you know the hot water?"

This was followed by another one of those moments where confusion is mistaken for lack of understanding. Naturally, we had no idea what he was talking about. He followed up with "Wait... do you speak English?"

After I assured him we did, he beckoned us to follow him to the kitchen. Trailing him through the hall and then the door, the smell only hit me slowly. Once in the kitchen, the acrid smoke punched me square in the face.

"I don't know what went wrong," Bert was panicked again, "it worked yesterday." This was a blatant lie, what he had tried would never have worked in a million years.

First I made sure the hot plate was unplugged. At leaast he had had enough sense to unplug it when things started going really badly. Realizing we were out of immediate danger, I explained the problem to him. "Well, you see, this kettle is electric. So you don't need to heat it on a hot plate, you just turn it on on this platform here. And seeing as how it's plastic, when the hot plate heated up, it just melted to it."

The only thing left to do was to air out the kitchen and basically the whole floor. We opened all the windows and doors, and then once the mass of fused stove element / plastic kettle had cooled enough, we just carried it outside so it would stop stinking up the place.

Monika couldn't stay in the kitchen with us as we were clearing up the mess. The excuse was the fumes, but the real reason was her inability to control her laughter. Passersby had less inhibitions, and we heard them openly mocking the smoldering pile left at the curbside.

If you've been reading our blog, and you came across our entry entitled "Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story", you may be questioning at this point the authenticity of this tale. So, just to assure you that we just couldn't make something like this up, we decided to document it with a bit of photojournalism as well:



A picture is worth a thousand words.