"Citizens of Berlin, Citizens of the World..."

We attended Barack Obama's public address in Berlin on Thursday. Over 200,000 people came from all over Europe to hear what he had to say and lined the street from the Siegessäule Column all the way to the Brandenburg Gates.

Here is a link to a video of the speech if you want to watch, click here.

I am posting some of our photos and hope to update with captions later.
[S adds the following captions.]



On Wed. we volunteered with the Obama campaign and Democrats Abroad to pass out flyers for the speech the following day. We picked up the flyers in Tiergarten and then decided to go to the nearby Hauptbahnhof to pass them out.



On Thursday, we got to the event location a little after 1pm. The gates did not open until 4pm and Obama was not speaking until 7pm but there was about 100 people already there. This is a picture from the entrance gates toward the Siegessäule.





After the gates opened everyone had to go through an additional security clearance area. We were near up front though and position ourselves right behind the front barricades to the left of the podium. In the foreground of this pic you can see R, the column base to the left and blue platform where the podium in positioned on the right.



Once through the security gates we still had about 3 hours to wait...over which time the entire area filled with people behind us. A tall German man in white was behind us with an American flag and waved it consistently the whole time. He was pictured in the press photo below...



I don't know why you can't see us in this pic. I think we were behind the guy with the Berkeley shirt on....Like that is R's ear the left of his head and my head is the dark shape to the right or something....



A German woman next to us brought this sign she made to show around. She had made it awhile back to encourage her son (who was there and also happens to be bi-racial) that wearing a bike helmet was an important thing to do....Obama YEAH!...a role model for children worldwide.



A little later, here is me, SS and R cut off on the left.



Obama came out right at 7pm with no introduction (except the PA announcer that basically said 'Introducing Barack Obama').



It might look cheesy, but because the sun was behind him this is the closest good press picture I have seen of what he actually looked like from our angle. We were about 18 feet away.



What you can only get a taste of on the video broadcasts is the behind us were speaker columns most of the way down the street toward Brandenberg Tor, which is about a mile in total....so as he spoke the time delay caused his voice to sort of roll/echo back behind us, as did the clapping responses (as they heard what he said). That aural effect gave you a real sense of the scale of the whole thing...even though you couldn't actually see it all except from the air.



After his speech, Obama came down and shook hands with the people in the very front...I didn't get to shake his hands (the girl in front of me did), but I took this picture as he went by.