Seattle trip

The Seattle trip went well.  Unfortunately, I couldn't renew my Mexican passport; they made a rule recently that you have to make an appointment to renew it.  I tried to set one up over the phone for that day (which was incredibly difficult, it was impossible to understand the guy's English over the noise of the traffic and a few times I had to ask him to repeat the same sentences about 10 times).  I successfully obtained my Korean visa in the next few days, it's pretty cool: it's like a whole page in my passport.  After that I volunteered with my friend Nick in voter protection for Patty Murray.  It was pretty cool, and then they let me volunteer for crowd control at her event, which Barrack Obama was to speak at!  It was great, I got to direct the people walking in and let everyone know that the floor seating was standing room only.

There were several speakers there, starting with the UW class president and some King County executive moving up through Bill Insley, Norm Dicks, Christine Gregoire, Patty, and then Barrack Obama.  Obama was awesome: he has a great presence.  It was pretty amazing to see someone that famous, that you only see on TV, right there in person.  And he totally looked at me a few times.  He focuses on certain people in the crowd during his speech, and I was standing by myself in the volunteer's seating section with a striped sweatshirt, so I stood out.  His speech was pretty negative though, the whole thing was about how all of our problems were caused by the Republicans in the 00s.  So that was different.  Earlier on his message had always been positive, talking about all that hopey-changey stuff, and he didn't have to play the blame game with the Republicans.  But now that the past two years have been so horrible and his approval ratings are so low that it's all he can do.  I think it's an indicator of the political climate right now and I don't think it's inconceivable for the Republicans to take both houses.