I'd love to explain Riot Tourism but instead I think I'll leave that to my brother today's guest blogger and inventor of Riot Tourism. If you have access to a professional writer is there really a reason to blog for yourself?
Your mother asks you not to go. Your boss sends you links to Yahoo! news articles with /lootingandlawless.html in the address. Wikitravel posts a warning tab above its city stub.
Your brother calls you from a hostel in the middle of nowhere. You know what he'll say before he gets it out. "Of course we're still going," you tell him.
For the first two days, you find yourself pausing on the walking paths between ancient monuments to admire a burnt out car or the charred facade of a bank. The first one maybe shocks you. You take a few pictures. "I think this one was a Pugeot," your brother says, kicking the loosened fibers of a car tire. You've never seen a tire burned like that, with the cords that make it a tire exposed, forcing you to consider that tires have component parts.
Many more pictures and information on Riot Tourism after the link...
"You don't even know what a Pugeot looks like," you tell your brother.
You walk on because mostly things aren't that bombed out and you've got ancient sites to visit. The "events" (as the locals keep referring to them) seem to be happening elsewhere (like the funny sounding place in the north that all the newspapers have decided to refer to as the country's "second-city") or not at all.
Later, from the hill above the city, you hear a bass drum of human voices coming from an unseen street below. "Should we check it out?" either you or your brother asks.
"Nah. Let's go to the top of the this hill where the most famous ancient site is."
"Sweet."
But the ancient site on the hill above the city and the unseen events is closed for a strike.
Your overly didactic younger brother (who probably needs to shave) does some gesturing to indicate the obvious. Striking Workers = Noises on the Unseen Streets Below = Riot Tourism.
Having done your research, you know that the first sign of a riot touring opportunity is the pedestrianizing of an otherwise vehicled street. This pedestrianizing can be accomplished two ways. One, the police can park a row of cars across a road (sometimes they go for the just as effective horizontal paddy wagon method). Or young ragamuffins can blockade a street with the charred ruins of Pugeots and trash bins.
Approaching Parliament you see signs of method one. You stop to photograph the police blockade. One of the cars flashes lights at you. Following proper riot tourist etiquette you wave, smile, nod, touch your heart and bow all in ways that indicate you are a foreigner and therefore not fair game for the men in gas masks or the kids in scarves.
Because scarves and gas masks are the easiest way to determine sides in a proper riot. They are the modern riot equivalent of the Grays and the Blues, the Yankees and the Red Sox.
The square in front of Parliament is thronged with scarves and gas masks. Much shouting, shaking of fists, and taunting transmits from the scarves to the gas masks. For the most part the gas masks respond to all of these sleights with straining stoicism.
You and your brother don't quite know what to make of your own presence. The scene is tense, but not violent. The participants seem to have mutually agreed to basically ignore that you are there. You decide to take advantage of this by moving freely between them and taking as many pictures as you can. Every time your camera clicks you think, "This will be the best picture I've ever taken."
Because the clicking of your camera seems to be propelling events further toward the surreal. Suddenly some of the scarfers are removing their uniforms. Then they are removing their shirts. Chants and shouts are in another language, but it's obvious that some sort of martyrdom is being reenacted. Someone passes a bouquet of flowers to the front. A girl stuffs flowers under the uniform of a gas masked riot police. They can't be that far apart in age, both maybe in their early twenties. Your camera lense catches a glance between them, something more like flirtation than anger.
You turn to realize that the phalanx of soldiers has gently been moving backwards, away from the crowd, that they're encircling you and your brother now. Your brother seems unaware. He has his camera, the small one for portraits, out. A girl is yelling at him. He seems to have violated some unwritten rule of the bystander code. A riot officer barks something at you through his gas mask. You stop as though you would understand what he said even if he weren't yelling it through a chemical weapon defense shield.
He points at the camera. You make the international riot tourist gestures of innocence. He does not seem to have read the riot tourism Wiki.
Behind you, two of the Parliament sentries begin jazz stepping in slippers, staring blankly over the whole scene. The clopping steps punctuate the protest chants and general murmur of fury. You yell something to your brother. He doesn't hear you. A gas mask is talking in his left ear. The scarf girl is still shouting at him.
You wonder at what moment does the surreal become something else. If you keep taking pictures long enough will your lens capture the moment when the imaginary line is crossed. When strained stoicism turns to darker.
You remember it's your brother in the lens and not someone else. You grab him and as quickly as you entered the thick, you exit it. No passport check. No "Hey, where are you going?!" That moment of heart rate seems absurd as you stand on the outer circle of the crowd, where middle-aged and twentysomething scarfers sip lattes and half pay attention to the line of police and youth only fifty yards away.
"Want to get a beer?" your brother asks you when the din of the crowd is once again competing with street traffic for your auditory affection.
You want to go back to the hotel. You want to start playing with the pictures. "I could drink a beer," you say.
Later, when you're sure that there aren't any scarfs or gas masks around you make a song of it. "We are the riot tourists. We go where the states are failed and the air is warm. We are the riot tourists," the chorus goes. There are no verses.
~story by r, photos by j
photos by j story by r
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