Presidents

This past week began with an unexpected return trip to Terezin, where I got to see a ceremony involving Shimon Peres, the President of Israel, and Vaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic. The Israeli Embassy invited the Czech Jewish Youth, which includes the students in my Jewish Studies Program. It was a small ceremony and neither speech was particularly exciting but it was cool just to be in their presence. We stood out as a group of Americans, mostly because we were all taking pictures. And the newspapers that reported on the ceremony said that there were about 100 people, mostly from the Czech Jewish Community, with some foreigners. I guess we stood out. In the picture, Peres is speaking and Klaus is on the far left.

But the more exciting part of Presidents Week was the arrival of Barack Obama. By coincidence, he came at the same time as my brother, Adam, and by coincidence, my brother's friend is working for Obama and helped coordinate his Prague speech. So on Saturday, the day of Obama's arrival, Adam and I offered to help at the Hilton (where Obama stayed). The hotel was a fortress, no surprise there. We arrived at 1 and told that we'd be needed at 3, to prepare to assist the staff when they arrived. But then our boss heard that the plane was delayed 90 minutes. And by "the plane," he meant Air Force One. So we were watching Obama on CNN speaking at the NATO conference, hoping that he would stop talking so that he could fly to Prague! It was absolutely ridiculous and pretty cool that our day depended on Obama's schedule.

While we were waiting, we were part of a discussion/briefing(?) with secret service agents about the plans for the motorcade's arrival, which made me feel really important until I sat on a couch for the next two hours waiting for something else to happen.

Finally, sometime around 6, one of the secret service agents said that they were "wheels down" and about a half hour later one of the motorcades arrived. My job was to press the button for the elevators and then swipe a hotel key and press "6." Pretty exciting stuff. There was never the massive rush of people I was expecting to see, and I'm sure that the President and his senior staff went in a back entrance. But after I swiped one guy into the elevator I turn back into the entry hall and there's Hillary Clinton! She'd just come out of the elevator next to me, surrounded by five or six people, and she walked right out of the hotel. Our only other sighting was David Axelrod, Obama's Chief Strategist (and not Campaign Manager, I apologize Adam), who was roaming around the hotel as we were leaving. His guide (I don't know what the right word is), who we'd met earlier, ran up to us and said "David Axelrod is using my cell phone and he won't get off!"

The next morning was the big speech in front of Prague Castle. Since we helped out for eight hours on Saturday, we got VIP tickets. We got to the castle a little after 8 for the 10am speech, and there was hardly anyone in the VIP area. We were surrounded mostly by Americans, who dominated the entire crowd. While we were waiting for it to start, Adam and I noticed Bubbles from The Wire walk by, so we went up and got a picture with him. And if you're a fan of the show, he actually does talk like Bubbles. And he's a really nice guy. Michael from The Wire was there, too, it turns out they're both in the George Lucas film about the Tuskeegee Airmen that's being filmed in Prague right now.

But the speech. I'd seen him 4 times, so I was used to hearing the same thing over and over. This was a nice change, although it was still definitely an Obama speech. He wove together Czech history with his own history with his message. It was pretty cool, and the 20,000 person crowd seemed to enjoy it. Everyone was saying how huge it was but for those of you who were under the Arch for the 100,000 person rally in October, it was relatively small. He spoke more about Czech history than I was expecting, and which our Czech Professor told us impressed everyone she talked to.

Immediately after he finished, Michelle came back out and they walked down the stairs right to us! We were two or three people back from the rail, so I got to shake both of their hands. They came so fast that I couldn't think of anything to say. It was really exciting and they walked all the way around the stage, slowly, shaking hands with everyone that could reach them.

It was quite a thrilling week. My future travel plans are to go to Budapest with my program next Thursday for the weekend, then to Bratislava and Brno the next weekend, and Olomouc (a college city in the eastern Czech Republic) the weekend after that. And hopefully some day trips mixed in.