Normally I hate crowds, but I figured this was a once in a lifetime experience, and I knew that Berlin was capable of setting up an efficient fanmile, so DH and I went to see Obama speak.
The crowd was a highly believable 200,000 people. The fan mile was actually about a mile long, and it was really filled with people, excepting for one gap that the security couldn’t fill up before the speech started.
The speech itself? Eh. I went with the intent of gathering some nonverbal cues, since Obama’s speeches are frequently as short on substance as they are long on pretty phrases. This speech didn’t help much, although I was quite pleased that he clearly stated that America had made mistakes. That is important to say.
Here are a pile of pictures. We were over an hour just in the security line, but we got within about 30 meters of the stand, and caught occasional glimpses of the speaker. We stopped even trying to take photos, since the crowds were moving about so much and we had to constantly look for gaps around the screen near the podium.
One person near us fainted, and I joined many other people sitting on the ground just trying to deal with the heat. We were off to the right in the picture that has the banner that reads like TOP. That was a group of idiots who felt they needed to tell Obama to pay attention to the environment. People near them, like us, ridiculed them until they put down their T-shirts which they used for the banner.
First, a picture from the media. We are in the lower right corner, impossible to find. That white blotch is the group of T-shirt protesters.
A button-totin’, dirndl-wearing campaign swag hawker:
Security
Security on stage, and the press (is that Jack Cafferty and Christiane Amanpour?)
The speech, in which Obama’s head is almost completely blocked
The afterglow, the sun was rapidly setting.
