Catchup: The First of May

The first of May is a festival/protest day here. I was told that during the day is a festival, and during the night they start rioting and burn cars etc. Sounded intriguing. I had packed everything up already so Floh and I went down to the festival part during the day! I was interested in music and dancing, but wanted to get out before riots. I've never seen a car get burnt up, but I didn't want to get burnt up myself. Either way, we headed down and walked towards the party.

This was taken on the way there - Berlin sure is pretty :)



We got there and there were indeed people dancing. A lot of people were just standing though...



cool tree thing



german punk singing in a wheelchair



dancing, or the department of silly walks?



leftists + anarchists = 1st May



spongebob!!



"you gentrify we occupy"



interesting car



well there was a lot of beer floating around, and after some beers and dancing it started to get dark. By this point I'd had enough beers that instead of going home I decided to stay to see if things got rioty. Police were very dressed up for the occasion. If it's one thing lefties and righties both don't like it's police.



It was strange, the police would walk around then randomly run together for no reason at all. Occasionally one or two would run at some random person just standing there then someone would start yelling.

This video is very dark but you can hear random people screaming


There were a LOT of people around, and between the closed off streets (where music was being performed) and the U-bahn there were a line of police and trucks to try and stop people from bringing their glass beer bottles out.

Someone made some fire, but it was put out


Eventually there were so many people they closed the U-bahn. They pushed people out of the underground pretty forcefully, then raided upstairs to close that and kick us out of the fenced street level area. I have a video of this happening but Flickr is being a bastard and is not letting me upload it at the moment. I've tried several times but it just won't load for now. Ugh.



In this next video you can hear everyone chanting at the police. This was from when we were still in the street level fenced part. At this point the cops were like a herd of animals. All they did was walk/run/lunge together in circles while people chanted that they were swine. Nothing was really happening other than the odd bottle blowing up. You can hear Florian talking about their use of words:




Now I have another video also not being uploaded for some reason, and you can hear a bottle thing blowing up close by. Also a good one. Grrrrr. Well I have a couple blurry photos for the end of the story...





I saw a couple people cut up from the bottles exploding, one on the hand and one on the face. One went off surprisingly close to us at one point, but not close enough to hit us at all. The noise was the biggest surprise. 



Once we were on the street again, we realized that nothing more was going to happen. This was it. Everyone we were talking to were doing the same thing as us - watching people and waiting to see if something more was going to happen. We felt kind of foolish so we took the metro home.