Celebrating Israel's 60th & Emergency on the Blue Line

It was a gorgeous day today. Sunny and warm, but not too warm, with a brief breeze on the National Mall, which hosted today's celebration of Israel's 60th Anniversary. There were a variety of bands, including rock'n'roll from Israel Mashina (photo below)

It was a very successful event; and we ran into many of our friends and neighbors.

There are a lot of Obama stickers in Hebrew, we got a couple. McCain was well represented too. His stickers were strickly in English. No Hillary stickers. 'I'm mad at her,' was the generally feeling. People who voted for her just shaking their heads in disbelief.

On our way home, our Blue Line train was stopped just short of Smithsonian station. The AC went off, then all of the lights, except the emergency lights. "We'll be here for a while. There's a medical emergency ahead." I didn't have my usual flashlight in my backpack. But we didn't need it. Let's see, I thought, could it be terrorists blowing up Israeli day? No. Hum. A medical emergency where they are asking us all to get off the train ... someone fell/was pushed/or jumped in front of the train. I was right. When we came out onto L'Enfant Plaze platform, the firemen were coming down the escalator the wrong way.

Dave heard them say, "She's talking." And our engineer, whose train she was under, said he was shaken. Here's the Washington Post article. I'm little annoyed because it did not mention that there were so many people on the Mall for the celebration. (And, why don't the Wash Post have Permalinks?) This is photo of the passangers lining up to walk to the front of the train. Our cars had not yet made it the platform. When we got off the train, it was pretty much chaos, calmness, but no one new where to go. The Metro people were too busy trying to deal with the women under the train to give directions. We helped one out of towner get to a different train. Mike from Minnesota was in Germantown playing a new organ that was just installed up there. He had a flight delay of five hours so he thougtht he'd see the city and was on his way back to the airport when we intercepted him and got him to the red line. Our good dead of the day.