Patrick in Spain

Posts Tagged ‘Platform 9 3/4’

On our last day in London today, we went back out to Westminster and saw the Westminster Abby. It was really nice from the outside, but because we had limited time and it was a bit more costly than I expected, we didn’t go in.

We went to a local restaurant just down the street from the abby. The other guys had more generic stuff, but I got the shepherd’s pie, and it was pretty awesome. I guess I should’ve taken a picture of how awesome it was, but I ate it too quickly and we were trying to beat the train strike.

I’m going to come back to the strike, but before we headed to our final stop, we visited the train station where part of the Harry Potter movies was filmed. They have a little thing set up for Platform 9 3/4, and Jason, Ben, Conrad, and I took some pictures looking pretty dumb.

So, on to the strike at the Metro. This story is pretty crazy, in my opinion. The workers of the London metro are pretty much all union members. They decided they weren’t getting enough pay, holidays, etc., so they informed the city that they would be striking today (June 9, 2009). The city and the union started having talks beginning, if I recall correctly, last week. Until yesterday, everything was going fine, and London was meeting pretty much all of their demands for increased pay and all that. What happened yesterday is that the union demanded that two fired employees be reinstated. Not such an unusual union request, you might think, but you’d reconsider if you heard why they were fired.

The first guy the union wanted to reinstate was fired for opening the doors on the wrong side of the train, as well as lying about having performed safety checks on the train. The second guy was fired for suspected theft from the Metro, and he will be on trial for said theft at some point this month. So, London, of course, couldn’t agree to that, so they didn’t. Thus, tonight at 7PM, they struck (or is it striked for this type of strike?). There were all kinds of advisory warnings to be off the metro by 7, so we made it to our last metro stop by 6:30. By that point, the trains had already been getting a bit packed. Our train to Liverpool wasn’t scheduled to be there until 8, so chilling out in the lounge was in order until it our train go to the platform.

Another story in the paper that I found amusing was one about the Obama family sans President Barack. Apparently Michelle and the kids visited London some time recently. The British paper that I was reading had a nearly half page article abot the Obama ladies eating a local pub. The paper, hiliariously, took an offended tone that the First Family ate at a local pub rather than at some high class restaurant. It even went as far as to make drinking puns such as “Mich-ale” and “O-bar-ma”.