Damn Terrorists

After Greenwich, Sim and I were eating lunch in a pub when breaking news came on tv that there had been another bombing on the underground. On July 7th, a fortnight earlier (since I am in England I can't miss the opportunity to use words like fortnight), there had been four suicide bombings on the Tube and a bus in London that killed 52 people. People were pretty edgy when I arrived in London. Lots of police walking around with automatic weapons and such. Details were sketchy as the new "bombings" had just happened. Fortunately this attempt failed, although we didn't know it at the time, and no one was killed (more info about both bombings).


This did however throw quite a kink into Sim and my plans for the day. It was roughly 14h (2pm) when we heard the news while in Greenwich in Eastern London. Our bags were at the Hostel on the North side of London and we had to be at Waterloo station on the South part of London at 19h (7pm) to catch the Eurostar to Paris. Normally not a problem to cover this distance in less than 2 hours, but we weren't yet sure how severe the bombing was or how the tube would be affected. We caught the train from Greenwich back into the central part of London without a problem. We then learned that one of the "bombings" was at Warren st. on the northern line which connected to our hostel. The northen line was shut down. We got off the train at Goodge Street (pronounced geedge if you were wondering), which was one stop from warren st. We attempted to walk around the Warren St station which had been cordoned off for several blocks around. The photo above is looking down the closed off Warren st. We finally made it up to Euston station above Warren st. and discovered the trains still weren't running. No one knew how to take a bus to our hostel either. We hopped on a bus that was headed north and got to the next tube stop only to find that everything was still closed. At this point I thought we were at a point where we would have to choose between going back to get our bags or catching the train to paris and leaving our stuff in London for a few days. I didn't think we were going to be able to do both. I called the hostel to see if they could store our bags and they said that the news was saying the trains were running again. We went back to the station and it was still closed, but in a few minutes it reopened and we were the first people to be let in again. We made it up to the hostel and then down to Waterloo with about an hour to spare. Plenty of time to get a few pints and some food at a pub (you can probably tell that I like pubs). For a while it seemed like it was going to be a very close call.