I've seen worse, but the city is
practically at a stand-still! But, then, this is London and THIS is how they
react to weather. It took us nearly two hours to get to the hotel from the
airport yesterday morning. The trains and busses were running disrupted
schedules, and the car service had to deal with the snarls of traffic that were
the impact of 1/2" of snow that fell throughout the morning hours.
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| London Snow Bunnies |
One of my colleagues and I headed
into London after a lunch at the local pub and took-in an exhibit at the Tate
Modern museum. On the way we encountered a group of (at a guess) college-aged
boys having a bit of Target Practice. They were scooping-up the drifted snow on
the Blackfriars Bridge, forming it into snowballs, and lobbing them off the
bridge at a floating ring in the Thames; trying to hit the drifting target and
cheering any time anyone made it.
It was harder than it looked,
between the continued snowfall making it hard to see, the motion of the current
in the river gently swaying the target, and the gloom of the early afternoon
making it seem night-like, I am surprised that they could hit the target at
all.
Later, on the way back to the
station, we came across a couple tourists (you could tell from their vain
attempts to navigate the surface streets of London armed only with a tube map
and a vague inkling of how the tube station distribution on it related to where
they actually were located. I was able to direct them to the appropriate tube
station for their needs and THAT is when we encountered the YOBs.
There were perhaps a dozen of
them. Hoodie-wearing youngsters prowling the river walk. one of them (he could
not have been more than about ten) scooped-up some snow and pelted one of the
tourists with it, another (his younger brother?) walked past me, reaching up as
high as he could to flip me off for no readily apparent reason - and to no
reaction whatsoever.
That was the encounter - it lasted
half a minute and had no lasting effect. It was memorable mostly for its near-surreal
pointlessness. Today, it is into the office to start the work portion of the
trip - I am here for work, after all!
Wherever you are today, I hope
that your day is going well.
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