bay to breakers

Every year San Francisco puts on a unique event. What started out as a race, that evolved into a fun run. Now it's a whole lot of fun run. 70,000 people take part in this, a few run it. Many treat is as a parade more than a run. They dress up in costume and bring loads and loads of booze. They start drinking at 7 a.m. and continue through until lunch time. It starts out on one side of t he city and ends by going through Golden Gate park and ending at Ocean Beach. So that's 7 miles of drinking. Many groups get together and manufacture carts that become ever more elaborate each year. People used to use shopping trolleys with a keg in it and maybe a few streamers on it. This year I saw a group that had a ping pong table that they pushed all the way through the city. It had a couple of kegs underneath it. Others had barbeques on them. Someone else had a big babies cot with about 10 guys following it wearing nappies.

One of my other favourite sights was the group of very elderly folks that had clearly been pushed out from some retirement home or another. They looked entirely disinterested as these wave of humanity poured past. They held up hand drawn signs on pink paper that had flowers on them and inspirational words like "Keep running", "Run like the wind". It was hilarious. They gazed, expressionless ahead with their signs held up, waking frame in front of them. I have no idea if they even knew what was going on.

This was the first time that I've ever seen women peeing behind trees. Now, I'm not talking about women running off into a forest to answers natures call. This is about watching a woman dressed as wonder woman darting from the parade with an escort of four other super heroes and squatting next to a tree about 5 feet from the main pathway through the park. Truely this is womens liberation manifesting itself and women taking back something once seen as the preserve of men alone.

As I made my way home along the pan handle of Golden Gate park, I saw a very San Francisco moment. There was a band playing. A farily typical 4 piece guitar band, playing away to no one in particular. Beside them, and I mean like 5 feet away, there were two people fencing. Dressed up in the full white gear and masks and all that, lunging at each other with swords. On the other side of the fencers were 3 people doing Tai Chi. There syncronised smooth movements were quite the contrast to the sports and music going on around them. This threesome of performances didn't draw a crowd of any size at all. This is a remarkable town.