Inauguration- that time I looked like a total tourist in my own city.
First things first- thank you so much to everyone who viewed my afghan post, reposted it, sent it to your friends, or gave it a thumbs up on Stumble-Upon. There was a fun little exciting period where it went kind of viral for a few hours. It's just nice for me to every now and then come up with some content that people actually enjoy! :P
For reference, here's the graph of my daily blog viewership (guess which day the afghan post was...):
I removed the axis scale because I'm so mysterious, but you get the idea- it was a lot more hits than usual!
This past weekend was tons of fun. My friend Ashley came in from Baltimore and we met up with Katie at my place in the city. We like to refer to ourselves as three generations of Sustainable UF, because we've all worked there at different times.
We decided to brave the crowds and head out to the National Mall to see the inauguration. Here's a photo of us while there:
Yeah, I wore a cowboy hat. Because it makes total sense, that's why.
Actually, we were all kind of operating under the assumption that the mall would be a huge mess of tourists wearing all kinds of crazy red/white/blue things. Wanting to blend in, we threw on all our patriotic clothes. And then we got there, and I'm pretty sure we were the most patriotic/cheesily dressed people in our area. Whoops. I definitely looked like a tourist.
On to the actual ceremony: I have to be honest, it was kind of disappointing. They set up big screens all along the mall so people can watch it. Unfortunately, our screen was having some severe technical difficulties which they never really sorted out. Essentially, we ended up only being able to hear about 1/5 of the words spoken, and the video kept cutting in and out. Whatever contractor was hired to make the AV happen dropped the ball. People in our area were yelling and we actually got worried at one point that people would stampede; we came up with an escape plan of how we'd get out if something started happening.
Luckily, everyone kept their cool, and we eventually gave up and went to Bobby's Burgers (holy yum, as always). After, we walked back to my place and watched the speeches/performances on youtube while sipping wine. I think if I'm still in D.C. come next inauguration (and whoever is being inaugurated doesn't disgust me too thoroughly), I'd try to go again. I'd recommend just getting there early and trying to be closer to the actual capitol building though.
I hope you're all staying warm! Yesterday, I almost slipped on an iced-over puddle on the sidewalk and had to deal with the "feels like 8 degrees" wind. Unpleasant.
