But with George Bush, Vladimir Putin, Hu Jintao and Australia's Neo conservative John Howard all in one place at one time who could resist a four for one protest bargain? Well the answer to that is probably most of you. These are the people most directly responsible for making the world a more polluted and dangerous place and when the time comes I at least want to say that I did something, even if it was only add myself to the large numbers of people on the streets saying I don't like what your doing.
Being as part of the reason that I was going was due to environmental grounds me and Gena decided to get the bus from Melbourne to one of its neighboring city Sydney. Flying there would only take an hour but it would make us hypocrites and I'm willing to sacrifice some comfort and convenience to avoid that. A bus ride sounds innocent enough till you get on the bus and realize the trip is going to take twelve hours plus. Australia is huge, really huge and just going to a different state normally involves driving for longer than it would take to traverse the entire length of England. My English mind find it really hard to process the huge amounts of undeveloped natural land in between the cities, this really is the new and almost totally empty world.
To help pass the time on the twelve hour trip they played a movie, that's right one movie in a twelve hour trip ... immediately I saw a hole in their plan. The movie came on and it was a Kevin Costner one ... well at least it was going to be a long movie. Luckily I had Gena sitting next to me and some conversation and shenanigans helped the trip pass much more pleasantly.
When we arrived Sydney was completely empty, our coach was driving through Sydney during rush hour in the morning and only had to stop if we happened upon a red light. It was a ghost town, we walked around the botanic gardens in the heart of Sydney and it was about 10 minutes before we saw anyone. There was a strange eeriness about the city streets and the thought kept recurring through my mind, this would be a great time to film a zombie or post apocalyptic film.
This was till you got to the green/red zone, the Australia government had erected a seven foot tall metal fence with concrete blocks behind it basically sealing off the Sydney CBD, when you got here there was a lot of people, they where all wearing the police uniforms but at least they where people. It was like being on a set of a movie, this obviously would be the bit in the movie where the zombies/anarchist looters attack the area where all the survivors (who in a new tradition have all trained as police) are starting to rebuild civilization.
Its really hard to just describe how many police there were ... near the Green zone whenever and which ever direction you looked there would be at least a handful of police there and a police car or two. I've never felt so safe and so in danger at the same time I got to wondering with this many police here it would be a great time to commit a crime somewhere else. Seriously what are the terrorists thinking about with all the security eggs so obviously in one few square mile basket why don't they attack somewhere else?
Being a veteran protester now ... after all this is my second protest I was prepared for anything ... we went to Hyde Park. Then something I really wasn't prepared for happened ... nothing! There where a few stands, a stage with a few people singing and talking and the normal bunch of anti capitalists trying to sell you things and a couple of hundred people milling around Then at three o'clock that ended and we just ended up doing some sight seeing.
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