Obama’s second act draws a smaller but spirited crowd

“We’re extremely disappointed. We’re just hoping to get home in time to see it on TV.”

Several Metro stations were jammed with flustered visitors.

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At Foggy Bottom, a line stretched along 23rd Street NW as hundreds of people waited to enter the station. “We feel like cattle,” said Lindsay Carless, a senior at Oakland University in Michigan. “This is overwhelming.”

Michelle Chandler of San Antonio didn’t have a bad trip into the city Monday morning, but she said she couldn’t believe the situation in the afternoon.

“I hate people,” she said, waiting down the block from Foggy Bottom. “I was expecting some holdup, but not like this.”

Then and now

In most ways, things appeared to proceed without too much trouble, and the weather, which was cold and breezy initially, grew warmer as the day went on and the sun appeared.

By late afternoon, though, even as the president and first lady walked past delirious parade watchers, shadows lengthened and the chill returned. Sunset found people taking last-minute snapshots at the Lincoln Memorial as the light faded to pink.

Some of those present said they had been here for the 2009 inauguration and felt compelled to return.

Others had missed the first one. “God gave me a second chance,” said Betty Thomas, 62, who with her sister-in-law, Rosie Thomas, had bused in from Indiana and Michigan.

“This is a piece of my history,” said Jennifer Shorkey, 24, of Saginaw, Mich., who had taken a 12-hour bus ride from Saginaw Valley State University. It was her first trip to Washington.

“This election was my first time voting,” she said. “So this isn’t just [American] history. . . .Voting for the first time, then seeing it happen in real life.”

Zan and Charlie Thompson, in their 60s, had come for the second time from Phoenix — she pushing him in a wheelchair because of a bad knee.

“We just put our little change together and made it,” she said. “He just hurt his knee and he can’t walk, so it was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to push you then.’ ”

Zan Thompson said they came to Washington because they wanted to “see what’s next. We’ve had four years. [The president’s] acclimated. He understands more than he did [at] this time four years ago. And I’m just excited about the future.”

Other attendees were not Americans but had come to see the wonder of an inauguration. Riyaz Sayed, 41, a human resources manager from India, said it had been his “lifetime dream” to watch an American president take office.

Obama “is the most powerful person on Earth, and people all over the world who have never met him, even my parents back in India, have such hope in him,” he said.

Anissa Tria, a World Bank employee from the Philippines, and Alexandre Alves, a high school teacher visiting from Brazil, met in the bleachers across from the White House and quickly discovered that they shared a common American hero.

“If I could have voted, it would have been for Obama,” said Tria, who set her alarm for 6 a.m. to get to the inauguration in time. “This isn’t my country, but I want what’s best for America.”