WASHINGTON -- Alejandro Gonzalez spent more than an hour stuck underground at a train station in Washington trying to get to the swearing-in of President Barack Obama.

The Georgetown University freshman, who is from Miami, said there were so many people trying to enter the Mall near the Capitol that there was a traffic jam underground.

Once on the Mall, Gonzalez had to push through dense crowds to get to his ticketed section of the viewing area. But he didn't seem to mind the fuss.

''It was really worth it,'' he said, ``and I was glad to be a part of history.''

Students from South Florida studying at Washington universities joined in the huge crowds that packed the Mall on Tuesday. Many began walking from their dorms as early as 8 Monday night. They carried blankets, coats and boxes of food.

Many students and their guests attended the inauguration ceremony even if they didn't have tickets to the designated area closest to the Capitol, which was closed off to the public.

Arianna Pattek, a Georgetown freshman from Boca Raton, had tickets to the closed-off area, and brought along her roommate Isabella Proia of Fort Lauderdale and two friends.

The group woke up at 3:45 a.m. and made it to the ticket line two hours later.

''I would have gone way earlier'' to wait in line to enter the ticketed section, said Proia, who added that the area was already crowded and that people had gotten there before 4 a.m.

Proia said the wait and the cold were worth it ``just to stand there and be so close to him and realize people were standing all the way back at the Lincoln Memorial.''

Pattek said she ''felt like the luckiest person in the entire world'' to have gotten tickets from Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla.

''When I went to pick up my tickets, I was like, how did I pull this off?'' she said.

She says she and Proia decided to take the Metro train from the nearby Rosslyn station to ''minimize the time I was spending outside'' in 20-degree weather, temperatures foreign to South Floridians.

''I was wearing three pairs of pants and seven layers on top, and I still couldn't feel my feet,'' she said.

Although the sun was out during the inauguration ceremony, the wind chill made it fee like temperatures were in the teens.

Not all braved the cold and the crowds happily.

Alexander Fryd, a freshman at American University, described his inauguration experience as ``easily one of the most miserable days of my life, aside from Obama's speech.''

Fryd, who is from Miami Beach, hadn't slept for 24 hours before he went to the Mall with a group of friends, and spent 11 hours in the cold with no food and no water ``because we're all idiots.''

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