Twas a rainy day today. Between my two computer science lectures, I went and ate a spaghetti lunch at La Vals in northside. After my second lecture, I hurried over to the architecture building to meet my photography class that was huddled in front of the building. Once everyone was there, we started walking.

Instead of a normal 3 hour class in our classroom, we took a "field trip" downtown. We first visited the offices of the Downtown Berkeley Association and met with the Executive Director. Then we went and paid a visit to the Berkeley Historical Society. Finally, we walked over to the window galleries in which we will be having an exhibition in January 2009.

It was raining very hard throughout the whole trip. One the way back to campus, we passed saw and heard some protesters down one of the cross streets. Since class had ended and everyone was heading off in different directions to go, a few of us ran over to the protesters and started making photographs.

One of my classmates took his Holga and immediately got very close to the protesters' faces, taking closeup photographs with the toy camera. This made me bolder, and I tried doing the same. By the end, I realized that protests are a gold mine for interesting photographs, because everyone in a protest is more than happy to be photographed, and more than willing to keep on doing what they're doing even while you have a huge lens pointed in their face.

In the evening, our small group went to Henry's home in Alameda for dinner and small group.