Shawn Smith’s web ninja life

We did it! We helped change come to the world! We’ll we actually didn’t do much other than attend the 2009 U.S. presidential inauguration ceremonies – swearing in Barack Obama as the 44th president.

@_samjones, @nikkicino and @shawnsmith (me) all drove through the night from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Washington, D.C. to hang out with my cousin Jessie (Sam’s sister @pandair). She has a great great great house near union station and had plenty of room for us to share.

Here’s a link to my inauguration photos and videos.

I will highlight some of them here in the meantime.

The first day walking around D.C. we went to the inauguration concert, which kicked off the celebrations. Walking up to the concert, I noticed that the fences had been taken down that were previously guarding the Washington Monument. This was awesome! I hadn’t seen such a clear view of the monument in years. Here’s the video of the Washington Monument without fences.

We stayed for most of the concert, which was really interesting. The crowd was so happy and warm, it made you forget about the freezing temps in D.C.

Here’s one of my favorite videos from the concert, people singing “American Pie” as we tried to exit the grounds between the Washington Monument and the Reflecting Pool.

THE CONCERT

We then went to dinner that night with some of Nikki’s old friends from AOL, and it was great seeing them again.

One item of note that I kept coming back to was the number of inauguration-type advertisements Ikea and Pepsi had up all over D.C. They really were playing them up.

OBAMA’S INAUGURATION CEREMONY

The city was quite crowded during the celebration, but we really didn’t have much trouble getting around D.C. We didn’t hit an overwhelming crowd until the day of the actual ceremony.

We had a great seat at the WW2 memorial, with an empty pool in front of us to break the crowd action. Some of the highlights was Obama taking the oath (video) and some girl throwing a shoe when they showed Bush on the jumbotrons.

Here’s how the crowd reacted when Obama was introduced to give his speech:

SOME DISAPPOINTMENT

One thing I have to say that really disappointed me was that after Obama’s awesome speach for American’s taking action on things like the economy and global warming, we walked through the national mall to see trash completely cover it. check it out:

GREAT TRIP!

All that said, it was an awesome time in D.C. and a blessing to be able to be there to witness it.

We finished our trip to D.C. with some sake bombs from Kyoto, a sushi place near Union Station. One of the sushi chefs put on a great performance for us with the bombs, check it out.

Sake Bombs at Kyoto in D.C. from shawn smith on Vimeo.

If you want to see more on our trip, just check out my inauguration photos and videos on Flickr.