Thanks to the lovely folks over at “Zero assumption recovery” I was able to recover all but two of the pictures that I’d been forced to delete.
Starting with the one that got me in, er, some trouble:
A few things to note here. I had to shrink the image to upload it so it might be harder to tell, but if you look at the McCafe sign you see a few things -- the man in the window under it (inside the 'closed' -- to anyone but undercover cops -- Mcdonalds) is intently staring right at me. As is the cop outside to his left, and the man immediately under the cop. The man to the right of window-dude was the guy who tried to take my camera /=
Posted in part to show you how many police were there, in part so you can look at the ground -- see how it's wet? It wasn't raining or anything today, but right around 2pm when the protests were about to start they drove two huge street-cleaning trucks through that sprayed water everywhere and cleared everyone out of the area. Clever, yeah?
More crowd control. My better shot of this one got unrecoverably deleted, sadly. But if you look at the bottom, you can see the random barrier they erected outside the Mcdonalds for 'maintenance' although there was just one dude with a jackhammer inside. The barrier cordoned off most of the street outside the 'left' side of Mcdonalds as it is shown here.
Guy in the orange was the one on my right arm, guy to his right was the main dude. Photographer they're harassing was my roommate's bosses friend. But he got to stay in the area and hang out with them up on the raised part, which is strange because they wouldn't let anybody else stay up there. Makes me think he's a domestic journalist who is just being regulated as opposed to censored entirely.
That is many police, yes?
P.S.
Special thanks to Nick “Su ke” Sauerberg for posing for the following photo, which, as the first/oldest image on my camera at present, was the first one to appear as I scrolled through the camera to prove that all pictures from today had been deleted. Surrounded by Chinese police and scrolling past this particular picture — and seeing the expression on my questioner’s face falter, just for a second — helped get my mindset past “I am unimaginably screwed” to “I’ll be fine, but this situation is stupider than Nick’s face” which was an incredibly healthy change in perspective to have.
