Nowtopian

Hills and Dales of Summer in San Francisco

During this prolonged blogging blackout, when all I could do was try to catch up with our wonderful trip to the Andes, I was doing lots of fun stuff around here too. In the past few weeks I’ve had some lovely walks, and the lovely experience of going to an obscure cement platform in the Marin headlands for Rebecca Solnit’s 50th birthday party on Friday, June 24. It was surprisingly a fog-free night and we got to the Rodeo Beach parking lot about a half hour before sunset (after meeting Adriana near Caltrain, and hoping against hope that we’d get stuck in traffic while Critical Mass rolled by! Hugh and I were totally psyched to be stuck in a car while bikes streamed around us… but we didn’t meet it, alas!).

Gorgeous light as we hiked north through the Marin Headlands...

That cement platform way down there is where we were headed. Eventually we were freezing, but it was a spectacular evening with lovely folks...

I still take my usual ride up Twin Peaks a couple of times a month at least.

Lots of fog and wind during June, practically blowing me off the hill in mid-month when I was up there.

July 9th, 2011 | Category: Nature and Me, Public Space, San Francisco news | Comments (1)

Lima at Last!

Our journey finally ended in Lima from March 17-21, 2011. Seems like such a long time ago now… we had a lovely visit, staying with Nelida Silva, a friend I made at the TedXAmazonia conference in November last. I gave a Nowtopia talk at a “Charla Solidaria” sponsored by Programa Democracia y Transformación Global, a non-party left group in Lima, Peru. I also gave a Critical Mass/bicycling talk for Cicloaxion, the local activist group we met there, thanks to Octavio who contacted me ahead of time…

This was a typical scene in downtown Lima, gorgeous old colonial buildings painted in bright colors.

Wandering around Lima was a great pleasure. I have to admit that I’d been a bit worried about it, having heard countless fearful accounts of people getting mugged in Lima, how street crime is out of control, etc., but we didn’t have any bad experiences. In fact, we walked around and rode the combi vans all over and never even felt like we were in a risky situation. Lima is great! Of course we only saw a part of it in the four days we were there, but we did get around a bit…

We were heading to a small anthropological museum when we saw this plaza in the distance. After we came out of the museum we walked over to see what it looked like more closely.

The plaza was filled with campers under cardboard roofs. Sugar workers were occupying the plaza, turns out they’d been there for three months, demanding that the government take steps to preserve a national sugar industry. It didn’t seem that their protest was getting much traction, but the occupation was impressive nonetheless.