Like I said, it didn’t take long for the 1621 Hobart road-house crew, to turn into family.

Sam and I have a great relationship. He’s one of my very best friends, so it doesn't come as a great surprise when all these people spending this unforgettable “Inauguration Weekend” with me, also turn out to be amazing. We all immediately connect, and over dinner we seal the deal that we are family for these few and intense days. I mean, we already had our mom…

One mom. One military journalist. Three Obama Transition Team staffers. One law school student. One Swedish-American freelance journalist. La Familia.

At dinner, which we get to after a two-hour wait in a sports bar filled to the rim with Obama worshipers, all of us feeling very American and proud of that fact, mom all of a sudden announces that she’s related to no one less than Pocahontas. Seventh generation. Short silence. We think. That makes Will…eight generation…and us… ninth, Peter decides. Toast!

“It’s a straight line,” Mom says. “I call her cousin Poky.”

Could we be more American?

Peter and Jordan use the newly found Pocahontas heritage as pickup lines with random girls we meet in the rowdy bar, Raven. It works like a charm. And as if they needed help, mom is there with her promotional support.

“You’re killin’ me, mom!” Will says again and again. But it works.
At one point, Will is sitting on one side of two cute girls, mom on the other, all discussing something…surprise, surprise…Obama-related. As the journalist and politics staffer nerds they are, all the guys have iPhones and Blackberrys. Sam sneakedly snaps a photo of Will, mom and the girls and text messages it over to him with the subject:
My Mom is My Wing Man. Hahahahaaaa…

Many a Pabst Blue Ribbons later, the girl with free ticket to the Obama Inauguration, all of a sudden got hit with jetlag. Mom, spilled her third beer, so I brought her home.

The bus rolls into Chinatown and I see a familiar face in the waiting crowd. Sam and I embrace in a big ol’ hug. It’s only been two months since he pulled a 44-hour guest appearance in Stockholm after a trip to Finland, but it feels like yesterday…and forever. Sam’s mom is Finish and we’ve haggled over international ice hockey bouts for years. We met through a circle of journalists, working for different papers in North Carolina five years ago and immediately became best friends, even though we worked for competing newspapers. Sam recently got a nice new job as a military journalist in Washington D.C.

Sam grabs my bag (oh, I love being back in America and among men with manners!) and we plow through the crowds toward the metro station.

The streets are completely crazy with people hawking Obama T-shirts, flags and all sorts of memorabilia. It feels like New Years Eve or something with confetti, balloons and cars in grid-lock. People are singing, dancing, filming, it’s just crazy. One suit-clad distinguished dude hangs out of a limo taking pictures of us, the crowd at a street corner.

“You’re not famous!” Sam shouts and the distinguished dude looks surprised and locks us into a shot. The dude was probably some big shot foreign politician.

The lines in the metro station are horrific and we have to wait forever to get on a train.
But it doesn’t matter. Everyone is happy. The mood is exhilarating.

We arrive at Sam’s place, which he shares with three other guys, on walking distance from The White House, The Capitol and The National Mall, where all inauguration hallaballoo will go down.

As we walk through the door of the road house, more than 100 years old, at 1621 Hobart Street, we are greeted by a motley crew of people, all of whom will be spending these historical days in this super cool pad.

Sam, Will, Will’s mom Mary, Jordan, Peter and myself. “Love” or Mr. Loveless, is missing in action and won’t show up until late, late. We think he’s a party pooper but in reality, the poor boy is stressed to the bone as his job on the Obama Transition Team consists of data and database information and he’s responsible for having all this switched from President No. 43 and President No. 44.

Will works in Legislative Affairs, on the Obama Transition Team, and is pretty stressed too with all the work he has to finish before lunchtime Tuesday, when Obama officially will be the president. Jordan, Will’s friend and a roommate to be, is also working on the Obama Transition Team, but on the personnel side. Peter, Jordan’s friend is a law school student from NYC. Mary, the mom, is a super cool lady, who loves life, owns a knitting shop in Virginia sweeps around the moving-disaster-of-a-two-story-apartment saying that she loves everyone and everything. She’s a bundle of fun and the most common words Will utters to her, though affectionately, is “Mom, you’re killing me!”

We don’t know it yet, but before Sunday night is at end, we will be family and Mary will be mom to all of us.

Shortly after my arrival, a case of Heineken, and an introduction-frenzy later, we head for the bars. Mom and Will also have tickets to the Inauguration. Now the Girl with a ticket to the Obama Inauguration has familiar company.

I and hundreds of others stand in the cold at Penn Station, Manhattan, waiting for the bus that will take us to Washington D.C. this Sunday the 18th of January. People from all over the world, all colors and all ages make up the line. Myself of course, a Swedish-American, a couple from Brazil and a black man with roots in Congo and has worked on Barack Obama’s campaign.

A homeless dude walks by and hollers:

Go Obama!

Someone responds the same way.
People look at each other, nodding and smiling. Almost everyone is in line to go to the America’s capitol and that for the same reason. Something that’s clear by people’s chitchat, that type of conversation between total strangers, which is so typically American.

We are loaded onto the bus with our bags all the while an Asian-American is loudly exclaiming the rules of the bus. One stop. 10 minutes – on the dot. Bathroom in the back. Oh, and the wireless connection (which was why I chose this particular bus company) isn’t working. Damn! I had work to do.

I could have flown directly to D.C. from Stockholm, but I figured I’d take care of some business in NYC plus I really, really wanted to be on a bus to maximize this experience. Most of the time, the people who ride buses in the otherwise car-crazy America, are the poorest, military people, homeless, students and single mothers. For me, who have a background as an American reporter in the newspaper industry, it’s in these places you get the best stories.

Fred, the man from Congo, and has worked on the campaign, also has a past in Congolese politics, but has to flee his country because of civil war, speaks fondly of Obama, whom he’s had the honor to meet several times. Of George W. Bush on the other hand, Fred doesn’t have too much nice to say.

“He has been spending this country’s money like a teenager with a credit card,” he says and shakes his head. The disgust is visible in his very dark face.

At the pit stop on the border to Delaware, Fred rushes in to get some food fried chicken, which he handsomely shares with everyone around him.

Some college students say that the trip is supposed to take four hours, but that we can expect to be delayed several hours because of traffic. And Fred chimes in, saying that we should consider ourselves lucky that we are coming in today, Sunday. Tomorrow, he says, Washington D.C. will be a closed city. It will be difficult to get in at all. Unfortunately we are so late that when the bus rolls in to Chinatown and I see the familiar face of my little “brother” Sam, I have missed a HUGE free concert held at Lincoln Memorial. A big shebang in which Beyonce, Shakira, Bruce Springsteen performs and Usher and Steve Wonder sings a duet. Tiger Woods was there. Obama was there. E.V.E.R.Y.O.N.E. was there.

But hey, the party has only just begun and I am a girl with a ticket to the Obama Inauguration.

On Nov. 5, less than three months ago, I stood in a hotel lobby in North Carolina’s capitol, Raleigh, when it was announced that a Barack Obama would become America’s president No. 44. I and my Godfather, who has fat ties in the N.C. Democratic Party, were celebrating the election, which undoubtedly will go down as one of the biggest, if not the biggest in U.S. History. The feeling during that election night was so vivid and…emotional… that I told him I’d love to go to the inauguration. He looked at me as we were finishing our drinks with the new N.C. Governor and said, “I’ll see what I can do.” In December he called and said he thought he had me covered. I thought he was joking and was flat broke, so I told people of the great score, but that I probably wouldn’t be able to afford to go.

On Tuesday, January 13, someone told me that I could not afford NOT to go and got me the airline ticket. (Thank you benefactor, I will always owe you!)

Already in Amsterdam, where I was connecting to New York, Obama’s presence is in the air. Some people wore Obama ’08 sweaters and the guys I end up sitting with on row 15, two Germans who are in the music industry, are headed over to observe the historical event and do some business. They will celebrate in Manhattan at some of the millions upon millions of parties this country will throw on January 20, 2009. They get jealous when they hear that I have tickets to the actual event, and will head down to Washington D.C. on Sunday. At this point, it’s still unrealistic that I am the girl with a ticket to the Obama Inauguration.

Part I
I woke up and smelled the coffee. Uncle Paulie gently tapped me on my head and put down a fresh cup of coffee on the nightstand, in what was once my room. Getting served coffee in bed by your very own Uncle Paulie can only be beat by one thing… well…ya’ know. Rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, I knew it was time – it was E Day.

“Get up, get purdy and get your voter card out,” he said and went into his office to write one of his columns.

When I asked if Uncle Paulie had something with the American flag on it for me to wear, he said no, but disappeared upstairs. He came down with his father’s dog tag (singular because one is missing) from World War II and let me wear it. Dressed in jeans and a neutral green T-shirt…and the dog tag that reads George R. O’Connor, we headed to our polling place, a church up the street. It was as I suspected. No line. For the past 10 days or so, I’ve seen early voters have been standing outside polling places in long snaking lines, in both Florida and North Carolina.

North Carolina, my second home, is traditionally a red state, but tonight that might change, some friends, mostly journalists, lobbyists and politicos, speculated during a homecoming dinner for me Sunday.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if we made it by one vote, Majsan’s vote,” someone said. Nobody asked who I’d vote for, I guess they assumed Obama.

The windshield wipers of Uncle Paulie’s red Volvo whisked away the pouring rain as we headed up the hill, a bastard hill I’ve run sooooo many times. We entered the building and were greeted by some last minute local pleas for votes in the local elections. My main goal is, of course, to vote in the presidential election, but I know many of the locals. The Attorney General, Roy Cooper, for example, I crossed paths on the crime beat. I was a little nervous, even though I know it’s easy. But that would just be my damn luck, to F up on such a simple, but very important mission. I gave the voting volunteer lady my name and address and she pulled off the sticker with my name on it off a thick pad. Then she explained to me how to mark my candidates and showed me to one of those standing booths. All I could think of was the Florida fiasco in 2000. To my irritation my hand was shaking, as I colored the first oval box, for the presidential candidate, with a black pen and continued down the double sided form.

When finished I carried my vote across the room and fed it into the vote-counting machine with a nervous smile. The machine swallowed my very first vote like a paper shredder and I had for the first time placed my personal imprint in the election of an American president. (I have written stories about elections.)

Afterward we went to Whole Foods, where I grabbed a latte and we sat down and discussed the historical moment. Historical for me, but also a very historical election. Women, black candidates, oddballs and crazies have been running the headlines on world media for two years and today is (hopefully) the pinnacle of that.

I asked Uncle Paulie what his prediction was.

“Obama just have to win Pennsylvania and hold on to the rest of the blue states and he’s the next president. That’s my prediction,” he said but went on, shaking his finger, to say that Pennsylvania was the big question in this election.

“If you see Pennsylvania go up as a republican state and Obama’s leading by six or seven points, who knows,” added my mentor, a politics journalist and my j-school professor, who we called Stalin behind his back.

He then looked at me and I said:

“You know what my prediction is?”
“What?”
“That I’m gonna get really drunk tonight.”

I’m no longer a voter-virgin and part II of my E Day is soon to start.

I’m in the process of getting “dolled up,” waiting for my Godfather who’s promised to talk me to all sorts of political parties tonight. (Only after I promised to leave my pen and paper at home.) I am looking forward to sip flashy cocktails and rub elbows with the North Carolina political elite, hoping for scandals and mayhem to break loose... stay tuned.

Sorry folks, but I've been to darn busy to update this blog as I'd like. I'm off to the polls this very minute and will write about that soon. Updates from Florida etc. will come later...

I am super excited about being a first-timer... Could hardly sleep all night.

As the train leaves Penn Station and the short female train conductor, who fits the expression – butch – to a tee, starts yelling. I know what’s she’s getting at. MY suitcases. I stashed them behind some seats next to the train door and found a more comfortable seat, kind of like you’d do it at any Swedish train. Shoulda known better.
“Whose soootcases do we have hea?” She barks, like a pissed off terrier in her rude New Yorker accent. “Whose soootcases do we have HEA?!”
If this was Sweden I would likely have been embarrassed, even blushed at such attention and hurriedly leaped from my seat to claim my bags. Instead, I raise my hand and say they are mine.
“Come hea! You can’t just leave ‘em! Come hea! Terrorrrrissssts!” Some people in the train look scared. It’s unclear if they’re scared of the threat my suitcases are posing or if they fear that Gestapo has just come to claim them. I just respond, “Calm down, already. I’ll be there.” I don’t even apologize, the beaaatch-butch’s not worth it.

I realize at that moment that I am a slightly different person when American. More self-confident. Chilled. Comfortable. I do, say and feel things that I don’t when Swedish.

Settled in my new seat, I turn on my laptop to clean up an interview. As I see the New York City skyline getting smaller and smaller in the distance, I plug in my head phones and turn on my latest favorite tune – Just Like a Woman, the Nina Simone version. Loudly.

She takes just like a woman, yeah, she does, and she makes love just like a woman, and she aches just like a woman – and she breaks … like a little girl.

Could be me.

The way Nina sings this song is just indescribable. Download it. It’s one of those songs that make every woman feel…hahahaa…just like a woman. It’s oozing sensuality. It’s so jazzy, bluesy, so old school, so American.

A couple of seats in front and across from me, sits a black dude with one of those spiffy suits that only statuesque black American men can pull off. It’s a dark gray suit with tan and white stripes and his starched white cuffs and collar are visible underneath. His shaved head is covered with a black felt hat, fifties style, and he reads a copy of The New York Times through tortoise-rimmed, rectangular spectacles. His shoes…give it to me baby… a pair of square-toed dress shoes in crocodile leather!!!

Everybody knows, baby’s got new clothes…

Oh yeah, he’s a “smoove playa,” as my friend Briston would say. It’s impossible to not look at him. Mr. Crocodile Shoes’ might be totally over the top, but man, he’s pimpin’ it. He’s noticed that I’m looking at him and he’s also noticing me jamming and singing, or miming actually (the conductor butch, probably would have me thrown off the train if I started singing for real.) He smiles and looks curious. I’m guessing that he’s trying to figure out what I’m listening to. I’m not dancing in my seat, but I’m definitely moving, tapping my fingers on the laptop and closing my eyes, seriously letting loose in this silent jam of mine. If I was on a Swedish train right now, people would probably be convinced I was one of them “crazies.” Liberation. Maybe he thinks I’m crazy, but he nods approvingly as if he could hear Nina’s husky voice and the backbeat. He is in the song without knowing it. Watching him becomes part of the song.

And your long-time curse hurts…

This is what I f***ing love about America. People. All these different people. Characters. The exchange. Watching them. Talking to them. Learning their story. Imagining their story.

Brentwood. The conductor with the rude New Yorker accent announces it loud enough to cut through my head phones. It’s evidentially Mr. Crocodile Shoes stop. He gets up. Looks me in the eye, touches his hat, as if he was about to take it off, but only lifts it a tiny bit. He smiles and says “Have a great trip, ma’am.”

Yes, I believe it’s time for us to quit…