I went to the Nanjing Olympic Torch relay.  It was a lot of fun and the nationalistic explosion that I had predicted.  There were even more people than there were when I went at 7:30 this morning (I described it then as literally millions stretched down Beijing Xi Lu– I mean that literally again.)  Since the runners were only going about 100 meters apiece in the city, I was fortunate enough to get to see the actual relay part up close and personally.  As with many times in China, the fact that I’m about a foot and a half taller than everyone around me was really helpful again. But when trying to get pictures of the torch, I was thwarted by the sheer number of flags  waving.  I got a few pictures of the torch if you look closely (or go to the photoset and zoom in) but it was really worth it for the shots of the crowd.  It’s not rare to see crowds like this in China, but it’s rare to see a crowd like this where everyone’s excited and generally happy.  Anyway, here are a few key pictures, and you can go see the flickr photoset here.

If you go to the full size version of the picture above, you can see the flame being passed. This is about the best shot I got of it.

Of course the police were out in full force for this.  I had no idea that a city this size could support so many.  In fact there were so many that they had formed a human road block about 5 people thick across Shanghai Road.

Rob, our boss, told us that when he was coming into school, the back alley ways of our neighborhood were filled with soldiers in full fatigues sporting shotguns and riot gear just waiting for anything to go wrong.  I meant to get some pictures of this as well, but barely made it in time to catch the actual torch.

Finally, the timing of the torch run was most “auspicious” (hahahahaha, more on that funny word later…).  Right after the conclusion of the run, the sky turned dark as night and a huge thunderstorm rolled through.  It really was spectacular timing.