The Streets of San Francisco

Each year, on the third Sunday in May, a race takes place in San Francisco called the Bay to Breakers. It's a 12km footrace which starts downtown and goes west across the city, finishing at Ocean Beach (Got to love America's use of imagination in creating place names - Big Tree Hill. Red Rock. Green Mountain). While some people do run the race seriously (the winner did it in 33 minutes), it's also an opportunity for San Franciscanites to let their hair down. Many take all day to walk the race. Some do it in costume (there are prizes for best costumes). Some even do the race naked. There's music pumping from themed moving floats, people dancing, and folk drinking and throwing tortillas at each other. The end result is a wildly debaucherous 80,000 person street party that winds its way through the city. A local SF friend of mine told me that the first year she did the race, she saw an old man walking the race naked, despite being equipped with, wait for it - a catheter. Yes sir! I thank Megan for that mental image. Anyway, I managed to get a snap of these spacemen and women who were running the race as a team. It gives you a good idea of the amount of effort people put into their costumes. Don't they look great!

One of the funniest things I saw was a lone christian man standing in the middle of the road as a sea of naked or half dressed drunk people flowed past him. He was holding up a solitary sign to the oncoming throng saying "You are all going to hell". If you look up "hopeless cause" in the dictionary, there is a photo of him. You have got to give him points for trying.