Obama Victory Speech

Yesterday evening I got the privilege of attending Obama’s victory speech at the Xcel Center in Saint Paul. It was a really crowded arena, which of course meant that getting in took forever to get in. The line for getting in was about 20 blocks (or 2 miles!) long and weaved in and out of the blocks of downtown Saint Paul. It took Eric, Nathaniel, and I (Mary was at a Luther event, but dropped us off) a lot of walking just to find the end of the line. When we did, we waited about an hour (in which we ate Subway we had brought for dinner) before the line even budged. When it did, it was just a few steps. Another half hour later we really got going, though again, just in little (but bigger than the first) steps. After 3 hours of being in line (we started at 6 pm) we finally saw the Xcel Center. It was not long after that we went through security and were in the arena’s outskirts. Just a mere 10 minutes after sitting down (straight in front of the stage, just a level up and far back) that Barack Obama was introduced and took the stage. The actual speech took just 45-50 minutes, but was actually quite good. Afterwords we got out of the Xcel Center in just about 10 minutes (likely less) of chaos and spent the next 15-20 minutes finding Mary who had come to pick us up again. All in all, it was a neat evening, and it feels good to know that I was a small part of a historic night! Enjoy, Alex.