It was about 4:50 pm local time, when we were hit by a big power failure which lasted several hours.
I had the windows open and was just merging MCS into GMCS, when suddenly my Windows box switched off and the battery light on my laptop went red. In the same moment, I heard several alarms outside - in some of the buildings around me, the burglar alarm goes off when the power goes down - so you cannot cut the power to circumvent the system. I tried turning on a light, and nothing happened ....
About half an hour later, I realized that I have to suspend my laptop to disk 'cause it was already very low on batteries: due to the good weather, I was hacking on my balcony most of the afternoon and just started to recharge the batteries. So I decided to go visit my mother. As I got into my car and hit one of the main traffic roads in the city, I quickly realized that this wasn't so easy: all the traffic lights were off and so there was a big chaos and several accidents. It took me almost 45 minutes to get to my parent's house, about twice the time it would normally take.
In my parent's house, I went to the basement with a flashlight and helped my mother find candles for the night. We talked a while and around 8:30pm, the power finally came back.
So I got into my car and started driving back home: it was still early in the evening and I really wanted to finish merging. However, as I was about one or two blocks away from my apartment, all of a sudden all the street lamps and the lights went off and it got dark. A few minutes before, they said in the radio that they're about to turn the power back on, but that it may still take a few hours until it's back everywhere and that they may also need to turn it back off a couple of times - they were still working on it.
I looked at my watch and it was about 9pm when I decided to turn around and drive to Luxemburg to go to the movies. While I was still in the city, I had to stop carefully at each intersection, but there wasn't a lot of traffic, so it took less than three minutes to leave the city and I arrived in Luxemburg in time. The film - Cronicles of Riddick - was kinda ok, so the trip was worth it :-)