Part 2: How I learned to stop worrying and loved the smell of tear gas...

Sorry it has been a while....busy....I'll talk about that in another post.

So where was I...ah yes...crazy chick yelling at us...

Okay so we got freaked out by the crazy chick yelling at us and decided to walk down 9th toward Univeristy past the 30-40 cops in riot gear. We talked about it and "as far away from the riot as humanly possible" was our descion. We walked at a rapid pace away from the source of noise, we took a few back alley because of massive amounts of crazy people.

We were down by Half Fast Subs near Broadway and as we were talking someone said "man, it would be insane to hear the cops right behind banging on their gear"...then everything got silent and still.

Then we heard (and it sounded like it was right behind us) *whap*whap*whap*whap*whap*...

Then we heard the crowd roar....

The "*whap*" was the cops beating their batons on the shields of the riot gear as the decended on the crowd.

We kept walking around the Hill trying to remember or find Tom's house and avoid where the crowd was going. Londyn called Tom's cell and asked what the cross streets were so we could find the place. We decided to walk up 13th at this point.

As were walking up the street it felt as if I had instantly got a sore throat, I began to cough. I noticed Londyn starting to cough as well. Jesse called out (she was walking in front) , "Uh guys, we are walking through a cloud of tear gas...and it's getting worse." It burned our nose and throat, and made our eyes water. Travis said it just made his eyes water and nothing else. Jesse had experiences tear gas before, she passed back mints for us to chew on as we tried to breath through our coats. And this was 3-6 blocks away from where they were dropping the tear gas....I can't imagine being right up in it or have a canister go off next to you. Londyn (the poor dear) was having a really ahrd time dealing with it. Mints work though.....it's weird...they helped alot. We saw a couple guys going down the way we came once we were out of the tear gas and warned them. It funny how in odd situations you just start talking to random people.

We finally got out ice cold little bodies to Tom's house. His roommate Josh opened the door. The party was over, pretty much. J.D. (Tom's bro who looks alot like Tom) was asleep in the dinning room. We met Austin, one of their friends, who was watching Garden State. Tom came out for a brief moment (Josh said he was about to go to bed) and he was accopanied by a girl (which I figure was his girlfriend and although I was not introduced I later found out I was right...I love how my intuition has not failed me with this whole thing). So we sat and watched the last half of Garden State, talked to Josh and Austin a bit about riots and other stuff. We left around 2am and figure that the riots has died down.

We walked outside in the bitter cold and thought it was over....

We were most definately wrong....the crowd roaring told us that...and it sounded a bit closer this time...

Part 3 later....when I don't have stuff to do....like emergency floor meeting....