It was quite a day yesterday. I actually did three different things worth noting, although one of them was also fairly standard: Laney and I went to see
Good Fortune, which was nowhere near as good as we expected or hoped. Laney liked it even less than I did, which is rare.
That was the last of the three things, though; the first, really, was the Diwali Festival
at Seattle Center, scheduled from noon to 6:00. This happened to coincide with the
No Kings Rally and March, the second one this year—the last one had been in June, just four months ago. That one started at Cal Anderson Park and then marched down Pine to Downtown. I suspect they moved it to Seattle Center for this one because of how huge that one was, with over 70,000 participants. That was also scheduled to start at noon, with the March starting at 2:00, so we felt pretty confident we'd have time to go inside the Armory and check out the Diwali Festival.
At first I sort of felt bad for the Diwali Festival, which is part of Seattle Center's "
Festál" program of annual culture fests that happen throughout the year, and would have been scheduled long before the No Kings rally was scheduled there. Would No Kings steal Diwali's thunder? Turns out, not so much: if anything, it may have brought more people into it. That said, with the tens of thousands of people outside, I kind of expected the Armory to be much more crowded than it was. But, the rally was actually happening outside so it makes sense that's where most of the people would be hanging out.
There were still plenty of people in the Armory. This festival, which I last went to with Shobhit and Karen
two years ago; Shobhit did some observance of the holiday last year but we did not go to the festival, as Shobhit had a work shift that day and Laney wasn't super interested. I had marked my calendar for the festival this year, not entirely sure whether we would go—but, when I found out the No Kings rally would be at Seattle Center, I knew we would.
And you know what? The Diwali: Lights of India festival this year was notably more impressive than even the 2023 one had been. They had a buffet of free food that was surprisingly delicious; and they had art and displays up on the second floor that was especially cool. We found a room full of paintings, mostly by teenagers, many of which were amazing. In that same room, back in one of the hallways upstairs, were three women at a table who offered painting of tile squares, which we declined. I felt a little bad for them, though, that this activity was not as readily apparent to the large numbers of people out in the main Armory floor downstairs. "Tell your friends about us!" one of them said as we left the room.
I easily could have spent a lot more time there than we did, although even if the rally weren't happening, Shobhit would not have lingered long. He gets impatient no matter where we are. We were in there for all of half an hour, having entered the Armory at 12:00 on the dot, and the last photo I took on our way out was at 12:33. I still managed
a 29-shot photo album, to which I'm sure at least a few more will get added after tomorrow, which is the actual Diwali holiday. Shobhit actually bought a couple new
Diyas, or clay lamps used in observance of the holiday.
On the main floor of the Armory there was even a beautiful portrait of one of these lamps, made entirely out of flower petals.
We saw plenty of protesters and rally participants before we even went into the Armory for the Diwali Festival. Shobhit and I decided to walk to Seattle Center from home, and we saw a sort of satellite gathering at Seattle Central College as we passed it on Pine; we saw others marching up 4th as we walked up 5th to Seattle Center, and they could not have been the people from SCC—they were likely contingents coming in from the ferry.
We walked past many amusing signs and people in giant blow-up animal costumes on our way through Seattle Center to the Armory. And then, just after 12:30 when we finished with the festival, we slowly made our way through the incredibly packed crowd, eventually finding a spot not far from the stage addressing the crowd atop Fisher Pavilion. The highlight, of course, was
Representative Pramila Jayapal, who rightly got huge support from the crowd. She had spoken at the rally at Cal Anderson Park in June as well.
I got around 20 shots of the Rally, either people heading to it or people at it, before we started to make our way to where the March was to start. The schedule had said the March would happen at 2:00, but the host of the Rally said as early as about 1:20 where people should head to start the March, and Shobhit and I started moving as soon as he said that. There was quite the bottleneck of people leaving Seattle Center at first, and it was maybe ten minutes before we were actually out of Seattle Center.
The March then went up 5th Avenue, and took us about half an hour to reach Pine Street at Westlake Center—and we were near the front. I kept seeing Monorails passing back and forth directly above us, and I saw people taking photos of the crowd from them, and I was like,
I want that! I told Shobhit it was too bad he didn't have an Orca pass to use like I did, and he suggested I just ride the Monorail back and forth without him. And so, I did.
I couldn't get to the very front of the Monorail, but I got close. There were three people ahead of me taking video, and I just held my phone above the head of the guy above me. The glass of the Monorail was a little warped, but the video I got still turned out very cool. And I was able to hop on a Monorail right back when I returned to Seattle Center, because with these crowds they were running both tracks pretty much constantly. I got back so quickly that Shobhit was still nearby because he had walked over to Pike Place Market, and we just walked back home together.
Once we got home, I had all of about 45 minutes before needing to leave again to meet up with Laney and walk back downtown for the movie. Shobhit had an event to go to last night and was gone when I got home, when I wrote my review, then worked on processing the day's photos while watching the last three episodes of the excellent Apple TV documentary about Martin Scorsese,
Mr. Scorsese. Shobhit got home around 10:00 and I still was up until nearly 1:00 finishing the docuseries.
[posted 11:4am]
