I sat on the hotel bed flipping through tv channels while Jeff was downstairs making preparations for his presentation. It had been a long day of travel with some excitment thrown in at the airport, i.e., having our passports conviscated and being detained for a couple hours. After thoroughly explaining our purpose three times, Mr. I Am The Law finally let us into the country. I think he was bored and just wanted to liven things up a little.
At this point, my body was unsure if it was day or night so I decided to chill out with some British comedy here, a game show there, and a bit of the Royal Wedding on the side. After a while, the news caught my eye. It was live feed from West London showing a riot ensuing in the downtown streets. What had been a protest of budget cuts earlier in the day had turned into a full on mob scene. Fires, vandalism, violence, police pushing back an angry crowd. And here I am thinking…Nice. We sure picked a great time to come to town. All sorts of crazy things started going through my mind and I figured we’d end up going home the next day! After too much time watching the news, I decided to let my tired brain go to sleep and see what the next day held for us.
We awoke in the morning and asked around about the previous nights’ excitment. Seems like it wasn’t anything too out of the ordinary and business was marching on as usual. I guess riots aren’t that big of a deal anyway. 😉
On that note, we caught a bus into town excited to see what stories would unfold before us.
