Had a Riot in Edinburgh, Literally
With so many protests happening around the world these days, travelers are bound to stumble upon one or two of them by chance while traversing the city. Obviously, there are countries that have civil unrests and protests quite often but sometimes it can happen in a seemingly peaceful city.
I was in Edinburgh in 2005 around the same time as the G8 summit. Two days after an organized march, “Make Poverty History” of which I attended, there was another smaller, unscheduled protest involving anarchist groups. I didn’t know that of course when I happily walked to the city center to do some last minute shopping.
When I reached Princes Street, it was dead quiet that day and I could feel a strange buzz in the air. It puzzled me for a second but I went into a local pharmacy to buy some toiletries. About 10 minutes later, the storekeeper said that we needed to make our final purchases because they were closing for the day. It wasn’t even noon! He hurried us out and shuttered the store. I decided to wander about a little and saw riot police taking formation! What the hell was going on? A couple of tourists and I started taking photos. I mean, it’s not every day that you see riot police standing in formation with the Edinburgh castle in the background. It was like a movie!
No one said anything to us so I crossed the road to head up to Old Town, still completely clueless but was incredibly curious. All the stores and restaurants on Princes Street were closed by the time I went to Old Town. I saw a bunch of young people with shaved heads or multi-colored hair, piercings and leather jackets sitting at the fountain. That’s very normal for Europe, but there were an unusually large number of them. I then noticed a large group of clowns. Clowns????
I didn’t get the magnitude of the protest until I saw billows of smoke and heard people shouting and fighting on Princes Street. I was safe on top of a hill looking down below in a mixture of curiosity and excitement. I felt like a news photographer (but with a crappy camera)!
There were no fancy smartphones in 2005 so there was no way to get information right there and then (I had a really sad flip phone too). When I finally reached an Internet cafe, I found out that it was an unscheduled G8 protest by various anarchist groups made up of young people from other European countries, but mostly from France. French anarchist clowns? It gets better and better!
There were approximately 2,000 riot police there and things got even more violent after I left. Bricks were thrown at the police, fires were started and public property was destroyed in the process. Thankfully, no one died or was seriously injured. I also noticed that only protestors, riot police and silly tourists (like me) were on the streets that day. The locals were cleverly holed up at home.
If you happen to come across an unscheduled large protest while traveling, keep a safe distance, don’t poke the angry bear (protestors or police), look like a confused tourist (I wasn’t acting!), and take photos discreetly. You’ll have one hell of a story to tell your friends and unlike me in 2005, you can actually live tweet the entire event!