I Wonder How They Celebrate the Inauguration Abroad?

What would you do if you were abroad when the new President was about to have his inauguration ceremony? Especially if said new President happened to be the result of your very first Presidential election? Well, let me just tell you how mine went down, and you can decide how this compares to what you would have imagined.

First of all, Sue and I started the evening off right by going to Mario's. Have I talked about Mario yet? 

Let me just bunny trail for a bit. Mario is this (I think) Turkish man who changed his name to Mario because he's obsessed with Italy and also, obviously, he wanted to own a pizzeria. What else would you do if you were obsessed with Italy? His little pizzeria, with walls covered with things 'Italian' - aka: pictures of Italian scenery, plastic lobsters, nets, etc. Obviously, we love this place. Also, cheap, good pizza, and Mario is quite the character. He refers to us as 'his friends' and gives us shots of shnaaps whenever we come in.

Okay. Bunny trail over. So Sue and I went and got a new kind of pizza and what should Mario have on tv but the inauguration...dubbed in German, of course. (BTW: Mario is really excited about Obama). We watched part of it, but then decided we should go because we most certainly could NOT understand the German dubbing.

We get back to the apartment, and everyone is upstairs watching the inauguration in English (apparently, we have CNN. Sweet, yo). Naturally, we joined in.

Then a few of us (Whit, Ellen, Emily, and I) went to a party on a ship on the Danube put on by Democrats Abroad. Way fun. I was going to get an Obama stamp, but I didn't have any change so I went and bought a beer but when I finally made it back up with some change, I couldn't find the guy with the Obama stamp. Sad day. Ah well. Still fun - full of expensive beer, drunk Americans, lots of dancing, live music. Aka: wonderful, minus how expensive the drinks were. Well, they weren't really that bad except that I've been buying beers for under a Euro from the PennyMart, so everything seems expensive in comparison. Haha.