2 posts tagged “protest”

Okay, so this is a little late, but I just now figured out how to upload photos from my cell phone to my computer.  Don't laugh, I am slowly catching up with the rest of civilization.  Anyway, these are a couple of photos from last Thursday, ie May Day, ie International Workers Day.  I met up with Andrew and a couple of his classmates on Muni, where a large group of SFSU students had swarmed and taken over an entire train. 

I'm just glad I knew what was going on, because if I had innocently been taking Muni and all of a sudden a mob of students pounding drums and chanting "Si se puede!" had appeared, I might have found it mildly irritating.  But as it was, it was pretty fun to be caught up in the excitement.  We (our little group, not the entire mob) stopped in the Castro for a couple of beers before the rally in Dolores Park, and then joined the march to Civic Center before everyone wandered off in different directions.  I'm not the most political person, so for me the best part was just being out in the sun.  But like I mentioned already it was easy to get caught up in everyone else's enthusiasm, which made the whole thing pretty fun in the end.

I haven't had any internet service in my apt for several days, and I AM SUFFERING!!!  My work schedule has increased slightly as well, meaning I haven't had very much time to utilize Quetzal, my fave internet cafe.  So today it took me about ten hours just to go through my Google Reader, which had over 200 unread items.  And to think, until I was run over by that van two years ago and used my settlement money to buy my laptop, I used to lead such a simple computer-free life.  Anyway, my family was in town last week, and I was able to do all of those touristy things that I would never think of normally, like visiting Alcatraz and scouring Telegraph Hill to find the wild parrots.  I, of course, had forgotten to bring my camera along, but my mom took photos and sent me some.  They are kind of small, but I think you can get the gist of our touristy-ness:

And yes, we did track down the parrots, which are not really that hard to find as they make such a racket:
I actually really enjoyed Alcatraz, which I hadn't been to in over ten years.  They have a new (free!) audio tour which is quite superior to the human guide led tours in the amount of information and aura of history and authenticity.  Plus, the dummies that three inmates constructed (including pasted on hair from their own heads, ew!) were in place in their cells, as they would have been when guards discovered them.  Neat-o.
After Alcatraz we walked down the Embarcadero for lunch at a taqueria by the Ferry Building.  There were a few birds enjoying lunch there, too:
The next day was the big protest day, in honor of the 5th anniversary of the Iraq war.  I was at work so I missed the whole thing, but my family was right there in the thick of it: