In the wrong city at the wrong time

I got in to the London office a bit late as I had been working at the hotel before leaving.

As I started my training session the television was on in the room and there were talks of power surges and problems in tube stations. However before I actually got started with my class the news changed to bombs and explosions and images of the first bus. We all sat there silent and watching as the events happened in front of us.

Eventually we decided to turn the television off for a bit and go on with the class. I continued for about and hour or two up til just about lunch time.

We then decided to put the television back on and found that there had been even more bombings and even more explosions around us.

At this point we decided lunch was a good idea...




The Head of Department decided, most kindly, to take us all out to lunch together. As we got out of the building we found that we had actually been inside of a blocked area. There were police all over us, with machine guns, and police borders around us. We walked up the street and were escorted by police to the closest restaurant.

We had a rather long lunch, especially under UK standards, which was accompanied by rather continuous quantities of wine. We tried to talk about anything else but the definite central point of our conversations was what was going on around us.

One of the women with us has a daughter who was in London on a school trip and she could not get through to her. We were all using each other's mobile phones to try and get through to friends and family as each mobile network would be saturated and others would not. It was a frustrating period of try, try and try again to get through. It appeared much easier to get through with foreign phone calls than domestic phone calls. It also seems that the 3G (IP) network was by far the more stable as one of us with a 3G phone had constantly no problem getting through.


After lunch we headed back to the office. One of us had I.D. which had the office address on it so the police let us through and in to the office.

We did not stay long in the office and left by about 15:30 - 15:45.

I walked up to Oxford Street to perhaps go shopping before heading back to the hotel. Almost all of the stores on Oxford Street were closed. I headed back to the hotel and the safety of my room. I watched the news for a while and finally fell asleep in the early evening...