today's program is brought to you by frog legs: quintessentially delicious!

Last night I went into town to watch Barack Obama's inauguration from the Café Gourmand. The event was hosted by the Bordeaux-USA association and the café was packed with Americans, American-loving Frenchies, and at least one woman who made it clear that she didn't love anyone as much as she loved her view of one of the two large televisions in the room as, from her seat at the back of the room, she shouted at people to get out of her way before the ceremony had even started.

I have to admit that I was moved to the point of tears. This seemed unjustified seeing as I've hardly been personally affected by what I would call Bush's tyrannies, and Obama's election will, in the immediate future, serve more to help me save face as an American abroad than anything else. Nonetheless, I cried.

One of the plethora journalists approached me and asked me why I was crying. I know he was just looking for a usable sound byte, but the question threw me off. "DUH," I wanted to say, motioning to the television screen, but I didn't know how to translate that into French. Instead, I tried to create grammatically correct sentences to express the hope Obama holds for Americans, BLAH BLAH BLAH. I won't pretend that anything I said was any better crafted than your average campaign ad, but cut me some slack! I was crying, for God's sake, and the difficulty of forming French sentences after watching CNN in English is not to be underestimated.

But the journalist saw through my shallow answers and wanted to know precisely which MOMENT had made my eyes well up. I was nearly frustrated by his persistence but gathered up all of my honest emotion and tried to put it into one sentence. I said, roughly (and in French):

"I never in my life expected to be proud to be an American, but tonight I am."

Today I received a text from Ethan that said, "Were you on the radio today?" I'm not sure why, but I hadn't really expected the journalist to use anything I said, and I definitely didn't expect for it to get back to me if he did. It turns out that a friend of Ethan's approached him at school saying that she had heard an Elizabeth from Ohio on the radio talking about the inauguration.

I was pretty excited to hear this. (Unlike Colin, I'm not used to hearing my own voice on the radio. Let's be real: I'm excited to be on WYSO. No, even better, I'm excited to be on local access television, so being on French radio was pretty cool.) In addition, my roommate Jessica greeted me this evening by telling me that I was famous: she had heard me, too!

I'm still having trouble expressing exactly what I'm feeling about President Obama. Ooh! Just writing "President Obama" makes me all tingly, though. Let's celebrate, America! Something has happened to us, and I may not be able to put it into words yet, but I know that it's amazing.

[NOTE: I'd like to find the clip and post it here, but I haven't yet been able to find it yet. I have a team of Frenchmen working on it though, so check back for updates.]