riot!

I looked out the window today and saw tons and tons of people out in our main intersection. At first they all started running down a side street, and then we saw them coming back. A crowd was also just pouring out of the metro stop in front of our apartment. Of course Marc had to hurry out with his camera. (Who knew he was an adrenaline junkie? Apparently, he should have been a photojournalist.)

He got the story by talking to people out on the street. A local store of some kind had planned a publicity stunt of giving out money. People heard about it on tv and so, of course, there was a run on it.

The police showed up and told the crowd that the free money thing would not be happening. Then there were a lot of frustrated people who just started looking around for mischief to make -- you could see it in their faces. Fortunately, the businesses on our street had foreseen this and had closed up quickly.

The grocery store didn't have time to gather in the produce that they sell outside, though, and people soon started throwing it. They didn't stop until everything was gone, and then they picked up the stuff from the ground and threw that.

At one point, we saw the woman who is often the outdoor cashier run over and bravely try to fend off the looters, but they started pelting her with fruit and she beat a hasty retreat.

Max said, "it's a citrus riot!" and it surely was.

People were hiding in phone booths, bus shelters, running down to the metro, and a bunch of them were trapped in cafés with all the doors shut.

This is shaky-cam, but it gives you a pretty good idea of what it was like.

At the beginning, it looked like they were just having fun. Riotous, destructive fun, but fun nonetheless -- which in some ways is even more disturbing than angry violence, isn't it? But then things took a turn for the worse. Some people saw us taking pictures and they started throwing fruit at us! Max got hit by a clementine, another one bounced into our geraniums, and then an apple came flying through the window and exploded everywhere. That's when Eva totally lost it. And there were a couple of guys down below making threatening gestures to us. We closed the windows after that!

I saw someone beneath our windows get hit with a melon and go down. Then a man and a woman hurriedly trying to get their baby down into the metro before they got hit.

They flipped a car over and stripped it. At this point, the riot had been going on for at least half an hour and we were wondering why in the world the police weren't there. Our best guess was that things like this don't usually happen in this area of Paris, so they likely weren't prepared with enough officers in the area.

They finally arrived, in full riot gear, after the car tipping. I was amazed by how long it took the crowd to disperse. They had a standoff for awhile with the police, and then some other cops with orange armbands and cans of tear gas started chasing people away, with a few well-timed sprays.

We saw a reporter beneath our window taping a segment for the news, and there were plenty of photographers on hand. One even asked if he could come up to our apartment for the bird's-eye view!

It was a totally crazy day here in the usually quiet 7th arrondissement.

**Check out Marc's post for his man-on-the-street perspective!**