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#2049 | Wednesday, September 11th, 2002
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Where was I? In Miami Beach. there were four of us English people who had planned to travel around the East coast before returning home after a summer of fun. We had just left our hostel and were having breakfast at a small café when we looked up and saw the events in New York on the news. To start with we though it was a film, until all these builders came crowding into the café to watch. thats when we realised it wasnt a film but real life.
Going back to the hostel, everyone was in shock.The hostel was full of English and Australian people and we were all sat around the bar watching things on a tiny portable television that had appeared from somewhere. none of us could really believe what was happening.
We were booked on a flight the following day to Washington and had no more money left. We ended up staying an extra week in Miami as we couldnt get out, and spending all day every day on a a pay phone in a very dodgy area ringing the air company waiting for them to resume flying so we could leave. Our parents had to wire us money so we could stay somewhere, although my mother thought we were flying to Washington on the 11th and had fainted at work in England as she didnt know where i was.
I will never be able to forget that day and as I was in New York a week later, the images of the remains still smoking and all the missing pictures posted up will stay with me forever.
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Katherine | 21 | United Kingdom
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#2050 | Wednesday, September 11th, 2002
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I remember very well that I was in my English lesson doing a media project. We were watching three extracts from various films and analysing them – one of these films was ‘On The Town’. It was the beginning of the film, at first looking onto the beautiful Manhattan skyline and then started into a song from the 3 sailors singing ‘New York, New York’. The clip ended at the end of the song and then our teacher turned the video off only to see the BBC Special News Report reporting that, 5 minutes ago, the first plane had struck the World Trade Centre. I didn’t really pay much attention to it and after a little gawping and gasps from the kids in the room the teacher decided to turn it off and got on with the review of the film without much more discussion on the news we had just heard.
It was later when I got back home, watching the news reports in more detail that it hit me how tragic this terrorist attack really was. Although the WTC were not built when the film was made, I was very distressed and puzzled with the co-incidence that we had just seen this fantastic clip of ‘On The Town’ and I’ll never forget how that film made me feel, and still will whenever I see it again.
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Christopher | 16 | United Kingdom
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#2051 | Wednesday, September 11th, 2002
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i was preparing for a biology exam when my mom said that something happened and i couldn't believe it and i started crying because it all seemed like some surrealist nightmare from the deepest recesses of hell.
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rosemary | 16 | Singapore
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#2052 | Wednesday, September 11th, 2002
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I was at home that morning and I got a call from my mother-in -law. That's how I found out about it.
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Michele | 32 | Pennsylvania
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#2053 | Wednesday, September 11th, 2002
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Would've been September 10, Monash university had had a clubs day and I'd got a small clear rubber ball with a picture of the world in it from the uni's travel agency. It would've been about 5am September 11 in New York when I had figured out that by squeezing the ball I could make bits of the image of the world go transparent as the paper image lost and regained contact with the clear plastic surface.
Being Australian as I am, the attack happened for me in the small hours of September 11/12. I'd been up fairly late, had been to university that day and on the computer at home. I was just climbing the stairs to go to bed, and I was on the second or third stair. The TV was on. And someone called me back down.
For the next couple of hours the whole family watched absolutely aghast.
I went to bed and turned on the TV in my room. The rest of the night, I sat and made notes about my perspective. The planes. The towers falling down. The Pentagon. The Australian Prime Minister touring Washington being frantically rushed to the basement of the Australian Embassy. Bill Clinton in Queensland. The lockdown of US airspace. What streets in NY were blocked.
There's nothing else to say. No words convey what happened. Everyone here will try and fail. There's no words to express what we felt on 11/9 (you Americans always did write the date weird) and since.
The following day, I talked to my American internet friends, then looked up a 1973 encyclopedia to find the words to all the verses of the Star Spangled Banner. (For background, most Australians can't remember _our own_ national anthem let alone yours.)
I sang them quietly, in a room, myself.
I hope I helped.
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Matt | 21 | Australia
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