Copenhagen Pt.2

Up at 8.30am to head into town for the marches.

We join the Friends of the Earth, ‘Flood’ to Parliament Square.
Once there we naturally gravitate to the Greenpeace contingent under a huge snowman.
There is Greenpeace France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Czech Rep and even further. We didn’t recognise anyone from England except Phil who we met up with.

The square is filling, I climb some steps to take a look, to the left a sea of heads and placards, to the right, even more, in fact as far as I can see.
We are told there are a hundred thousand people here.

Speeches start and predictably go on a bit, starting to get cold now. It’s about 5 degrees but dry.
Then we are off, gradually the crowd moves on, we are glad to get moving and get some space.
Holding our banner, we attract attention from several Canadians who all agree with what we are doing and march with us.

As we pass a Shell garage I get an urge to run over and declare to anyone who will listen, that Shell are up to their necks in dirty Tar Sands. By amazing co-incidence a Canadian TV crew were right there and we did a short interview. We were also picked up by a Canadian radio station.

Dark comes early here and by 4pm torches were being lit at the end of the 6km march. There is more confusion as people are stopped and mill about, half an hour later and more were still arriving.
I climb a small tower, the view was incredible, a stream of protestors maybe a mile long.

Then we hear that a group had been held by the Police at the back of the march, it’s not ‘til later do we learn more about it.
We had work to do tonight so we made our way to our accommodation to pick up supplies then back into the centre to rendezvous with the Canadians, Phil and a couple of others….