State Of The Union Address

While I am here in D.C. I plan to take as many opportunities and go as many places as I can. I want to take advantage of my time here and never sit around just doing anything. So, so far every night I have been out in the city doing something. Tonight was the state of the union address, and so OF COURSE I was going to head on over to the capitol (given that it's only 8 blocks and all :) and see what I could get into! Before the state of the union address even begun you can hear the parade of sirens outside my window, knowing that they were escorting "people" there. Then just walking outside of my apartment you could already see all of the lights from the police cars all around the capitol. There were tons, and obviously I didn't expect anything less. The cops lined the entire perimeter of the capitol building, with each one standing 10 feet apart. Walking down there was rather intimidating because we had no idea where exactly we could walk, and which streets we could turn down. They had so much blocked off, and there were so many cops and FBI everywhere. It was actually really cool to see, and very surreal. At first I kept on worrying about doing something wrong, until I started hearing the words of Joey (my boyfriend) in my head..."don't be worried about doing something, because the worst they can tell you is to leave". Of course he only means that for legal things :P I thought about that a lot especially when we walked around the perimeter of the capitol building umpteen times and knew that the security was probably starting to recognize us. One of the girls in our group kept saying that we probably looked suspicious for continuing to walk around, especially because FOR SOME REASON there was hardly anybody else out doing what we were doing! We opted to believe that we were probably the only  ones out circling the capitol because we're total tourists. Honestly though, I still don't understand why nobody else wouldn't want to be outside the capitol where the state of the union address was happening. They could have DVR'd it like us.

The cops were surprisingly very nice. I thought they would be like every other cop in all of the buildings here where they're rude and have no sense of humor. Depending on what side of the capitol you were on, you either; couldn't take a picture, could take a picture, or were aloud to take a picture but had to continue to walk while doing so. I only knew this because I would ask every cop before I took one. Seriously though, these cops were really nice. We would stop and talk to them and ask them which was the best way to take that would get us closer to the building and closer to the action when the President was done speaking. They were more than willing to talk to us, and some even joked around with us. One awkward and embarrassing moment was when we were walking and I was looking at the capitol because I still can't get over the fact that I live by it, and this cop across the street from me standing guard waves. Now I'm sort of tagging behind the group because I'm walking slower looking at the capitol, so I know that he waved in my complete direction. Although, during those couple seconds of thinking about what just happened I couldn't understand why in the world a cop standing guard would  wave at me. So instead of waving back, because I honestly had no idea if he actually waved at me and didn't want to look like an idiot, I looked to the other side of me. I thought maybe he was waving at another cop on the other side of me, but then I instead found myself with the group ahead of me and nothing besides me other than a building. So I looked back at him and he was laughing, and the cop next to him was laughing, and I felt like a total idiot. Then he waved again at me with a huge smile on his face. Seriously though, besides the fact that I felt totally stupid because I did the whole "look behind you thing because you don't know if they're actually talking to you", I just could not understand why in the world this cop wasn't looking out for other things...ya know, like crazy people. It was rather humorous though and my group got a good laugh.

While taking our laps around the capitol waiting for Obama to finish, I learned a lot about DC security. Now I'm sure they are trained professionals, and can do their job well, but this is what I learned about them; They are overly friendly, and all of the ones that are sitting in there police cars, fire trucks, or the cars that tail behind the "important cars" like to sit and play on there cell phones a lot. I don't think that I saw one law enforcer whom was seated inside of there vehicle, not on a phone. Although I could give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are all republicans ;)

Fortunately we rounded the right side of the capitol in the right place at the right time, because as soon as it let out we ended up right at the entrance of the road where everyone would be leaving. Again, I want to mention that we were seriously some of the only ones there (there were only 4 of us in my group that went out btw). There were maybe a total of 10 other people who were standing where we were. I guess living in DC, the politicians just don't phase them anymore. Really the only reason I was there was because I was secretly hoping that someone would be extra nice and let me interview them :P We watched as 5 cop cars in a row would start coming out of the entrance, and the lead cop car would flash his cop light and the black escalades would make a complete 180 and zoop out of there spots to get in line behind the cop cars. Then their sirens would sound all the way down the road until we couldn't see them anymore. Then people dressed very fancy would walk out and past us to get to their cars. To make what has already been a long enough blog entry shorter I'll just cut to the chase and say that we ended up standing there long enough to see 2 limos with the presidential seal on them leave with tons and tons of cop cars all around it. If you watch the video below you can see what I'm talking about. I started taping not realizing what was going on, so it's a little shaky and all over the place. When it gets to the end you'll see that somebody walks in front of me and you can't see the ending, and all you hear is talking. When that happens just turn the video off. Unfortunately I don't have any of my cool editing software here to cut all of the out.

Also, check out my new capitol picture up where my blog title is at! First off, I actually got a picture of the capitol that fits all the way across, and second, it's my own picture instead of one from google! It's a picture I took tonight while the State of the Union Address was going on :)