Allegheny Jet

Wobbly,

Riding you bike during a political uprising puts all us cyclocross racers to shame. You have got a big pair.

wobblyoldgeezer

Nah. Couple of cashews in a hankie.

Protests are
a) vastly over-reported by an uninformed media ('Pearl Square' - it's a suburban roundabout, traffic circle) and the gathering there is hugely outnumbered by the 'loyalist' demonstrations
b) highly localised and easy to avoid unless you have a partisan or voyeuristic reason to go

All hope that the disturbance is short lived, and yet there's a widely shared feeling that the dispersal of the crowd on Thusrday morning was ill judged and disproportionate

surfrider

Nice to konw what's really happening over there from someone who's caught in the middle of it.

FWIW: In the mid-1990s I was in La Paz, Bolivia when the government was overthrown. A little tear gas and gunfire made it interesting. When we asked the hotel manager about getting to the airport he said "don't worry, this happens every few years." He quickly (and sarcastically) followed it up with: "In the USA you'd call this a revolution. Here its so normal that we call it an 'election'." The next day we went out shopping and, except for a noticably increased level of police and military, the locals seemed to just take it as a normal part of life in Bolivia, as if nothing unusual had happened. On the way to the airport we got stopped four times by police and military roadblocks, but it was just a quick passport check before we were waived through.

Dan Burkhart 

The media can raise a little snow storm to crisis proportions. Let them get their teeth into a little political uprising and it's the end of the world as we know it.