trying the mobile blogging technology again today. OK, and encouraged by an initial success, I will continue. I saw a man vacuuming a water feature today. I realise that doesn't sound as preposterous as it looked, but it did look absurdly like a domestic vacuum cleaner.
That's not the right picture, although it is the railway station I was heading for when I saw the water vacuuming.
Thursday was torch in Guangzhou day and I'm guessing most of the population got to within 100 meters of it. I got to within 5 meters of it, but there was a massive surge backwards in the crowd and I was busy trying not to fall over and not to step on anyone if they had fallen over so I was looking at the ground when it went past. But still it was a hugely excellent experience being in the middle of an enormous crowd. I was at the Asian Cup in Beijing in 2005 and there was something of the experience in that, but the crowd here was immensely larger. The crowd management people do/did an extraordinary job. It is really a miracle that so few get hurt - I was going to say no-one, but I feel sure that somewhere someone must have been - because no-one in the crowd really is interested in the crowd management view. So the police push, everybody moves back, the police relax, the crowd surges forward, police push, and you get the idea. All of this is conducted with remarkable good humour - the crowd expect the police to push them back, and the police don't particulalrly expect the crowd to stray where it has been pushed. No-one gets angry or frustrated, well, no-one in the few thousand people I was with. No doubt it all occasionally goes wrong.
Looks to me like the Olympics will be a big success, if anyone can get to it.
1 comment:
Terrific blog, moreso since you mastered the art of photo upload - congratulations.
Keep it up, hope I'm not the solo reader.
I sympathise with your views about Google trying to make things easy while simulatenously confusing the crap out of you.
nick f
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