Putting the Fun in Falun Gong

I heard about it only last Friday. The President of China would be coming here to Microsoft on the first leg of his United States visit. Yesterday it all began. There were helicopters everywhere and police cars at every corner. Apparently, Dick Cheney was at the Mariott and there were people talking about snipers on the roof. Yesterday afternoon there were already Falun Gong protesters standing at the corner of the busy intersection right outside of One Microsoft Way.

Today at around Noon, I decided to take a walk down to Building 33 where President Hu and his entourage would be arriving to see what was going on over there. They already had the area cordoned off by the time I arrived there. Everything from the sidewalks to the curb was taped or barricaded off so I had to walk through the grass to get anywhere. Nobody knew when Hu would arrive, but a Seattle PI photographer I talked to said it would be sometime around 4, and that in a couple of hours the Secret Service would arrive to clear the area and place tour busses to block areas. There were several Falun Gong protesters sitting inside a barricade of orange plastic mesh doing exercises and holding signs.

Outside of Building 33 there were huge banners hung over the side of the building, and the Microsoft flag was replaced with the Chinese flag. More pictures at my Flickr photo stream.

Things were pretty quiet despite all of the protestor activity and I was getting sunburned, so I walked back to my office and ended up getting stuck in meetings for the rest of the afternoon. As Leslie and I were eating dinner at Blue Ginger, I saw lots of helicopters pretty much ensuring that the entourage was at Microsoft doing their entourage stuff.

As we were driving back home on 520, we saw the motorcade going down Westbound 520 heading to Bill's house for some rhubarb brown butter almond cake, no doubt.