Last weekend I was still asleep at 9am. But, 10 text messages, four phone calls and two hours later, I was standing on the Yellow Line train on my way to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.

It seemed like everyone and his mother, brother, and distant cousins came into town to watch the rally because every metro station we stopped at was simply inundated with so many people. After a long, stuffy, and extremely crowded train ride, my two friends and I finally made it into D.C.

The closer we walked to the Mall, the more interesting things got.

For starters, there were street musicians taking advantage of the mass crowds to show their talent and make a dollar or two.

Also, the writing on all the home-made signs were nothing short of hilarious. My favorite one was a sign that this girl made that read “Look! I made a sign!” I thought it was so great because it really embodied the semi-serious point of the rally, which, to me, was that people really should not take all of this politics business so seriously.

After squeezing and weaving through hundreds of people, we finally found a comfortable place to stand under a tree.

We were pretty far away from the stage, but there was a mega screen right in front of us so the view wasn’t too bad.

It was pretty funny overall with both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert there, but at times it got pretty boring, mainly because a lot of the guest stars (with the exception of maybe John Legend) were really only appreciated by an older demographic.

For example, I think the only other person I knew there besides John Legend and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was Yusuf (Cat Stevens), and that was only because I recognized the song he was singing from the movie Remember the Titans.

Once the rally was over, my friends and I stuck around, mainly because the metro was a mess, and there were still so many more interesting things to do with the rest of our day in D.C.

There was this really cool musical contraption set up across the street from one of the Smithsonian Museum that included a human-sized drum and a bunch of mini drums and bells. It was really cool because anyone who wanted could go up and play along with everyone else.

Around 6p.m., after walking over to Chinatown to do some eating and window shopping, we decided that it was about time we head home.

When we got to the metro station, however, we were forced to wait outside for an extra 30 minutes because it was too crowed underground still. Finally, after almost two hours we made it home!

The whole day overall was just so unexpected, but fascinating nonetheless. It was really neat to go to the rally and hear other people’s opinions. Many of the conversations that I had with other attendees really opened my eyes to so many other ideas that I had never heard before, which really made the whole day just so much more enriching.

The best part by far of the whole experience was all the really great Halloween costumes. The costumes ranged from home-made rockets to the full cast of Alice and Wonderland. There was even a lot of Waldo’s running around the crowd. All in all, the trip to the rally definitely made last weekend very worthwhile.