Day 6

Today we all spent the day at our internship offices. The Bernie people stayed in Manchester all day and made a lot of phone calls!! It was a good day but I was extremely tired.

The C-SPAN bus came to our office and the USF volunteers were interviewed (which was really exciting). After that we were invited onto their bus and they talked to us about internship opportunities. 

At about 2 pm, I got a personal phone call from Chris Matthews (yes, the host of Hardball on MSNBC!). I'm actually extremely lucky because a friend of my family, Tom Wentzel, served in the Peace Corps with Chris Matthews and asked Chris if he would be willing to meet with me (thank you so much, Tom!!). 

Getting the phone call was shocking to say the least. He told me where he was staying and that he was going to be filming that night in the hotel restaurant. So I told my classmates and it turned out only 3 of us could go (which really made getting there a lot easier!). When we got there we discovered it was PACKED! We weren't sure how much of a chance we would have to meet him. As we were coming to terms with that, Madeleine Albright walked past us and said hi!! At that point we decided we couldn't leave because it was just too exciting! I even ended up in the background on tv!

(I have more pictures but they're all quite blurry)

We ended up asking the person guarding the VIP area (where Chris Matthews was filming) if he could help us out. We were worried our story wouldn't sound believable but evidently it was and he helped us out a ton (thank you Kevin!). We decided to wait until Chris Matthews was done filming because it would be too hard to try to meet him on a commercial break. 

Once he was done, he went around taking pictures with people and asking "where are my peace corps people?". We actually escorted him out of the restaurant and he led us to a table to sit down and talk (our area was guarded by security so no one else could come in... Except his nephew who we met!). He sat down and started talking about his time in the Peace Corps with Tom which was very interesting! Then he said "so what can I do for ya?" And I had no idea what to say!!! I was starstruck, honestly. He talked to us about the primaries and what he thought of all the different campaigns which was very entertaining (haha). 

We chatted for about 15 minutes before he said he had to go to watch the debate so he could talk about it on his show afterwards. We asked if we could take some pictures with him and he said yes but that we should do one-on-one pictures because doing standing group photos looks like you met randomly in a hallway... I agree. 

It was really an incredible experience!!! After he left all three of us were freaking out and we decided to sit down and call our parents to tell them what just happened! 

Eventually we went to a quick dinner before heading home. It was an amazing day!!!