Please allow me to introduce myself: I am a man of wealth and taste.
Well, not really.
I just got back from a tour of Berlin with a German family that I'm staying with: the parents of an exchange student that we hosted a few years ago. We ended the day with a quick visit to a park. There, we saw my future president, two hundred thousand Germans, and history.
I woke up this morning in a hotel, where I scanned the Berlin paper. Just from a quick once-over, I managed to find five pages dedicated solely to Obama's visit. The top of the second page of the paper consisted of the bold text Yes, He Comes. The picture beneath it was one of John F. Kennedy, with the adoring crowd reaching out for him.
As we toured Berlin this morning, it seemed that every conversation I heard had the word "Obama" shoved somewhere inside the German.
The pictures that have been shown on DailyKOS are quite good, although they don't fully do justice to what the park was like. There was a screen set up, like the ones used previously in the World Cup, so there were thousands and thousands of people away from the front of the scene jockeying for position in order to see a picture of the fellow. Agile youths were hanging from light poles and trees to get up above the crowd, much to the chagrin of the security. (I was trying to use a video camera at the time, so climbing was out of the question. I did get seriously threatened and chewed out in German by a vendor who seemed to think that I was trying to climb on top of his very-solidly-built stall in order to get a better look. No idea at all how he got that idea into his head.)
Mentioning the vendor, that reminds me of the feeling of the scene. It felt like a festival. There were vendors lining the street. A good portion of the crowd was enjoying the event with a large cup of nice, cold beer. Back in the gardens, I'm pretty certain I smelled marijuana. Evidently, there were a few laid-back souls who had given up getting a position where they might see him, so they figured that they'd just find a nice and comfortable spot, and listen to the speech. (I should have been one of those folks. Instead, I battled against inevitability.)
The excitement amongst us all was almost palpable.
A few unlucky souls, (Only ten thousand, or so, myself included) in their attempt to find a better spot without having to squish their way through the crowd, ingeniously tried to go around the crowd itself, into the garden. Unfortunately, authorities were ready for such tactics- there were fences set up at quite rude places.
In the end, I wound up stuck behind a fence directly behind the outhouses, listening to this historic speech. And on the bright side, I got to chat up a quite pretty security guard- and she even spoke fluent English!
PS: Added a script of the speech, for those of you who haven't seen it, here.
--Keille