complich8’s journal

So after some hemming and hawing about whether or not to go to the inauguration, But in the end, some urging by friends and the fading symptoms of the cold I’ve fought for the last week, I opted to go ahead and go.

And I gotta say, it was NUTS. Just insane numbers of people there. There were seriously MILLIONS of people there. I’m hearing just under 2 million people, official count.

My roommates decided to tag along when I told them I was going. We all ended up leaving the house a little before 8 am, took the bus to the nearest metro station. There were maybe 80 people in Rockville station waiting to buy farecards and stuff.

We walked right by that crowd, ’cause all three of us are locals with smarttrip cards. Yay locals! We felt superior.

Got on the train, and all but the last two cars were packed. By the time we got off the train a dozen or so stops later, that train was also completely packed.

Well, we carried on down, walked maybe 2 or 3 miles in a seemingly endless crowd of people all going the same place as us. It was absolutely nuts. We filled in the mall, and found someplace to stand near the bathroom building just east of the Washington monument. So like … a mile out from the action, but a couple hundred feet from the nearest jumbo-tron. And then there was an hour or so of watching random footage from Sunday’s concert before the program started.

And lemme tell ya, it was ASS cold… and not one person complained about it within earshot. Now, I grant you there were only like 20,000 people that I could hear, but …. you know, that’s still something, ’cause it was pretty bitter out there.

Entertainingly, the audio lagged about 5 seconds behind the video for pretty much all of the proceedings… so that was sort of odd.

Anyway, we waited, watched, listened…. took craptons of pictures, and had a generally good time. And of course got to see the live stream of pretty much everything. Laughed at the chief justice going off script. Laughed at the booing every time we saw Bush without Obama by his side, and the confused ambiguity when they were together: “Do we applaud Obama, or boo Bush?” Enjoyed Aretha and the absurdly all-star quartet and all the military musicians. Honestly, you’d have a better experience watching it at home (verified: tivo’d nbc’s coverage… better view, more context, warmer, but a lot less crowd energy), but it was really cool to know that what we were seeing was just under a mile east of us on the other side of a seemingly endless and remarkably friendly and well-behaved crowd. You know, other than the sort of classless booing and whatnot.

Well, after Obama’s speech and the hilarious benediction we made our way back off the mall and out with just absurd numbers of people, squeezed onto a train and left, mainly because it was really really cold. But also pretty fun.

If you want to see what we were seeing, well … I took just shy of 180 pics, which are on my gallery and also on my facebook profile. They’re pretty much unedited and chronologically numbered, so … if you’re interested, check them out!

Off to work and back to normal tomorrow… it’s a whole new day…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 10:17 pm and is filed under life and times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.