Post-Election Day

An American Election Day rather quickly becomes Election Night over here, thanks to the six-hour time difference, and I'd made plans to meet a bunch of expat friends for the evening at an election-watching party hosted by the Democrats Abroad. The party itself was lackluster, but it was nice to be around friends to share the election-related anxiety.

We hung out in the lobby (pictured above) rather than the main auditorium, where one friend went in and reported back that they were showing some kind of boring slideshow of facts – "But I already know who I'm voting for!" she said – that was being watched by a bunch of rapt presumably-Germans, who sighed in annoyance when she had to pass in front of them to get her coat.

(Pictured: The auditorium, and I don't know what those guys on the stage are doing...)

There must have been about two journalists for every non-journalist at this event, and as a result people kept trying to interview each other... I watched as one young journalist interviewed two of my friends (one of whom is also a journalist). "Why do you think there are so many Democrats here?" the journalist asked, and we all looked at her blankly because the party was hosted by the Democrats Abroad.

The frustrating thing was that I had to leave before anything actually happened – state-by-state results come in between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. here, and there was no way I could afford to pull an all-nighter: I'd promised to be on-call for Spiegel Online International all the next day, translating election-related articles as they came in.

(Pictured: Discovery that my necklace more or less matched Obama's campaign symbol – which was also the stamp on our hands at the entrance to the event.)

So I made my way home early-ish, and only a couple states had been called when I went to bed for a scant 2 or 3 hours of sleep...and woke up to the headlines that the election had been called for Obama!

I had about five seconds to be slightly sad I hadn't been there to experience the results coming in and hear the final call, before I had to dash out of the house (I'd set my alarm, but woke up late to find something had gone wrong with it, which was alarming...heh, pun) to meet friends for breakfast – we'd agreed to convene again at 7 a.m. to see the last results and celebrate and/or commiserate.

As it happened, our timing was just right to watch Obama's acceptance speech. (When I talked with a friend in the U.S. much later that day, she found it funny that she'd watched the speech just before finally going to bed, and I'd watched it over breakfast.)

We were only able to get a German TV station, unfortunately, so it was a matter of straining to hear Obama under the overdubbed simultaneous translation. (Or, in my case, listening to both at once and comparing, impressed by the general quality of the translation but also amused by a few small mistakes and omissions.)

Here we are, listening to Obama from Berlin:

Then straight into a long workday, where I helped with turning around election-related articles as quickly as possible after the German authors filed, to get them up on the English-language site.

And yes, I appreciate the irony, that I was translating about an American election from German back into English. The thing is, the pieces are by Spiegel's (German) correspondents who are covering the event from the field, then filing their stories back to Germany. Then we translate them to give you, the English-speaking readership, the German perspective on the election!

For once in this situation (where I've been involved in a bunch of articles at once) I actually thought to take a screenshot of the page, so here you go. Of the four election-related articles that made up the top of the page yesterday, I translated or helped partially translate three:

And then I crashed into bed and slept.