Last night was pretty late for me and for Charlie, but he woke up early to go to the Rally. He was out of here by 7:00 which is by far the earliest he has gotten up on a saturday. He met some more of his friends and walked to the Metro Station to get on when it opened.
Jim, Amy, and myself however decided that we would walk and avoid all of the crowds... Yeah right! Anyway, I got up at about 8 and walked down to Georgetown to meet Amy and Jim who had walked across the Key Bridge from Rosslyn. They ate breakfast, and I watched some lacrosse until they finished. I had already eaten some fruit by the way, but Amy got me a bagel:) Lacrosse was pretty interesting, since I had never actually seen it played before, but it didn't seem all that exciting from the sidelines, and it was girls lacrosse. So anyway, right after that, we started walking to the rally. We had some interesting conversations and arrived at the scene at about 11:20. There were so many people even before then that had been walking on the sidewalks too. Then a little later when we were past the monument about equidistant from the monument and the Capitol Building, we stopped. It wasn't so much a voluntary stop as it was a stop, because the masses of people had become too dense that one couldn't move further. Previous to this, we had been wading through the people inch by inch, but then, as we were right next to the first aid tent, we stopped. This was somewhat unfortunate, because some people claimed to have been injured and we were often asked to step aside to make room for them. There was the main stage, and them 5 "Jumbotrons" which were huge screens that had speakers beside them so everyone could feel like they were closer. We were about in the middle of the group by the time it started, and being by the last jumbotron on the left, I have no clue how the people behind us could see anything at all. We got pretty lucky, as we could hardly see the jumbotron that was in front of us.
Ok, so anyway, enough of the crowd description for the moment. The show started with a preformance by the "Roots." I had never heard of them, and they were ok and got the crowd going pretty well. After that, to two main hosts from Myth Busters came out and had us do the wave. It was realy cool looking, but at the moment, I can't find a good video of it from the cameras in the front. A little later after Stephen Colbert did a parody of the Chilean miners, as he came on stage from his "fear bunker" and emerged on the stage in one of the capsuls used to rescue the Miners. Then they had this performance. It was really cool to hear songs that I had actually heard of before. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoIjLFmit84 Then went on to have some more performaces by musicians and then they had the reasonableness awards and the fear awards. Anyway, there were some video montages and they were pretty cool/somewhat funny. It was a pretty crazy experience and I had never seen famous people before. Actually I didn't see them, but if the jumbotron had been moved over a tiny bit, I could have seen them, because I could see the edge of the stage.
We had a crazy time getting away from there too, and the streets were packed for what seemed probably a mile or so. We were eventually able to move again though after 20 minutes or so mucking through the crowds. I will definitely remember this for a long time. After the standing for hours and hours and walking for a long way, our feet were so sore. We walked all the way to Union Station, so we could hopefully avoid some crowds, but we still had to wait until the second trian came before we could get on. We searched out the bathrooms in the union station and there were huge lines, but we eventually made it. After this, we headed to American University to get dinner and rest our feet a while. Jim left to go back to his Hotel to do some homework before leaving today in the early morning. After that Amy and I did some homework and then she went home and we went to bed.
There are lots more videos about the rally if you want to look for them. There were also lots and lots of signs.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/30/the-funniest-signs-at-the_n_776490.html#s169304
Here are some that I found.
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