Thursday, July 21, 2005

London Day 4 - The Second London Bombings

We woke up and checked out of our hotel and then caught a bus down to the tower of London. On the way to the Tower, Mandy found out that her LCD screen on her camera had somehow been broken. It was a shame as she had gone through a lot of trouble in Paris to find the charger to use the camera.

I stayed outside of the tower with the luggage as there was nowhere to check it in. While I was waiting for them, I picked up a baguette sandwich and fed the birds for a while. The pigeons were too slow to get anything from the little brown and black birds that were all over. There was one of the small birds that was so fast that he would jump up and catch the bread before it even hit the ground. I tried to fake him out, but he wouldn't go for it. He just kept hopping around and squawking at me like he was screaming, "Bring it".

After mom and Mandy had finished their tour of the tower, we caught the RV1 back to to Waterloo station. As we walked into the station, I saw a Reuters report about an underground station being closed for some reason. I figured it was just another closing like the ones we had seen earlier.

We got to Paris and stopped to eat at a little cafe outside of the Paris Est station as Mom and Mandy were both fighting a little bit of a cold and were rather tired. I had sausages and french fries, mom had a chicken salad, and mandy had a ham hock with potato salad that was really good. While we were waiting for our meals to come out, this man walked by our table, took a roll out of our bread basket and said Merci. Not only did he not look like a bum, but the roll he had taken out of our basket was the one I had already taken a bite out of, when I was joking with Mandy that I needed to mark my roll so I didn't catch any of their colds. He was just lucky that he didn't grab the one that Mandy had licked, or he would have been cursing the Americans and their infected bread.

It wasn't until we stopped into the hotel bar at the Accor for some white wine that we found out that there had been a second series of attempted bombings in London right before we had gone to Waterloo station. One was on the 26 bus line, which operated in the same area as the bus we took to waterloo station. We could have easily been on that bus if we had been just a block over from where we caught the RV1. I had the horrible thought that the father from the tour the other day, who had been paying for cabs instead of taking public transit in London, was probably thinking, "I told you so". It didn't change my mind about going to London and when Lexi heard about it, she too was still willing to go and was willing to ride public transit. You can't feel threatened when you travel in first world nations because of the fear of terrorists acts. Whether you stay where you live or travel abroad, you're still at risk so why change your habits just for them.

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