Inauguration!

Matt and I went to visit Uncle Jamie this weekend, hoping to catch the inauguration in person. We had a lovely time, catching a ride down early Friday morning with my housemate Courtney and going to Chinatown for noodles and the Gallery Place Museums. Saturday we went into town with Uncle Jamie and hit up the National Gallery's Pompeii exhibit, the newly reopened American History Museum (where we were big spoilsports, especially me), the Freer and Sackler quickly quickly, the Botanical Gardens, and a new exhibit at the Hirshhorn. It was good-- they're some of my favorites, and Matt had never seen any of them.

Monday we heeded Barack Obama's call to service and picked up trash on M. Street for a couple of hours, then went to the Museum of African Art, which had in its basement a really moving exhibit of photographs of major civil rights events from the 50's and 60's. Then we sat in the Freer for awhile and had a really good talk about what gets to be called art, and what kind of message is sent by having non-European art in separate "marked" buildings while the Europeans are just "art," no special intro needed.


And then--ah, and then Tuesday. Basically, Carter very graciously gave us two tickets to the standing area right up front, and then we all went downtown and got misdirected for hours, I almost got crushed against a barrier, Matt and I waited in another line for several hours, and then we realized we were never getting into that section but by then it was too late to get onto the Mall as well, so we couldn't see the inauguration at all, not even on screens. Apparently this happened to a lot of people: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/inauguration-watch/2009/01/inaugural_committe_apologizes.html

Anyway, it was really frustrating that there were no police officers to tell us anything most of the time, and when we did manage to find any they either wouldn't tell us anything or gave us wrong information. But then when we tried to jump on top of a wall as a last-ditch effort to see at least a fraction of the inauguration on a distant jumbotron or something, there they were to yell at us and make us afraid of being shot. So that was disappointing, but it was great to be there in the city being excited with everyone, and hey: new president out of the deal, right? Wooo!

When we get the disposable camera developed, I may or may not have some inauguration pictures (well, inauguration-day pictures) to post on here.

Oh, and then we drove back Tuesday night with Kevin so as to get back to school for Wednesday classes, which was awesome. The school front looks pretty good.