January 20th marked the inauguration of the 44th U.S. President, Barack Obama. It also marked the first time I have gone to a Subway since arriving in D.C. over a year ago. Both events have their place in history but this day was Barack's day. The masses gathered in from all over the nation totaling roughly 1.9 million people. In ancticipation of the event I reserved spots in the conference room where I work (10th & Pennsylvania, between the Capitol and the White House) so my guests, Val W. and Andrew W., and I could be in the middle of the goingson and partake of the energy of the atmosphere. Due to the road & bridge closures we thought it best to arrive the night before and sleep at the office. The idea seemed flawless except for two setbacks. One, we were grossly underprepared with one pad, one sleeping bag, and two towels between the three of us. This made for a very uncomfortable night of repose, not to mention the awkward exchange with the Mexican cleaning lady when she came in around 11:00p and just emptied the trash as if we weren't there. Two, we failed to take into account that my office and The Mall are on opposite sides of Penn Ave. which meant that we were trapped on the wrong side of Penn until 11:00a--the ceremony started around 11:30. Needless to say, we crossed at 11:00a and pushed our way onto The Mall by about 11:25. We ended up between the Washington and The Capitol just behind the Smithsonian Castle. For those of you who don't know D.C., this just means that we were close enough that we could tell that there is a Capitol, but far enough away that we definitely couldn't make anybody out. Fortunately, they had speakers and jumbotrons there so we could all tell what was going on. Bush was introduced and all the crowd around us started booing. I felt bad for "dubbya". I decided not to join in on the "hey hey hey, goodbye" chants. Then Obama came out and the crowd got excited. The announcer asked the audience to "please stand", and about a million people laughed in unison at the irony since they had been standing for about 4 or 5 straight hours. Then some crazy guy gave a prayer followed by Yitzhak Perlman, Yo Yo Ma, &c doing a cool rendition of 'Air and Simple Gifts'. Then Obama was sworn in and he gave a speech. I thought the speech was superb. He touched on most all of the points that I find important for a President to address and he provided the masses with a vision of refining America and uniting to achieve something great and restore our place at the top. In the words of the great Ricky Bobby, "We? No, we are not French. We're American, because you're in America, okay? Greatest country on the planet."
