...I slept badly because my favourite character on The Bill was killed. At 4am I was up feeding 10 week old Joel. The tele-evangelists weren't on TV. The same news was on every channel. I didn't understand. I went and told Andrew that something bad had happened. That America was under attack. He told me not to worry. That nothing had happened.
You?
I drove to Hobart to go to a conference on the changes to the workers compensation law in Tasmania. One of the guys speaking at the conference was an American.
ReplyDeleteI woke up to the morning news about it - I couldn't believe it at first and needed pictures to understand how the towers could have collapsed because I knew something about the structure of them and how they had withstood a truck bomb in the basement in 1993.
ReplyDeleteWe were in Port Macquarie. Had just found out we were pregnant with Aidan. We heard on the radio and turned on the TV so we could see it was real. We wondered how we could bring a child into such a frightening world. And then we had to go off to work like it was a normal day...and all over the hospital there were TVs with the non-stop coverage running.
ReplyDeleteI was watching the West Wing.
ReplyDeleteWe were renting the bottom half of a house, and our friends/landlords upstairs had heard in the middle of the night, but didn't wake us. Just a casual "Have you heard the news yet this morning" on our way out to work.
ReplyDeleteSpent most of the day researching on the web. Worked out fairly early on that estimates of casualties were grossly inflated, so was glad that half of the dead weren't. But still, fairly gobsmacked.
Was living and working up north in Innisfail. House-sitting a place 20 minutes north of town. I vaguely recall the ABC news headlines came on when my clock radio turned on a 6am. I woke up properly 20 minutes later thinking it was some kind of horrible dream. If only...
ReplyDeleteWas in Japanese language school. Didn't hear until I went into classes that morning (the 12th) and our Japanese teachers told us.
ReplyDeleteI was particularly shocked by our American colleagues' reactions. It seemed they couldn't believe that someone didn't like America!
I almost never watch TV: too busy with small children. The phone rang early in the morning. My husband answered it - it was someone from his family. He came into the bedroom to tell me to get out of bed, that possibly up to 10 000 people had been killed in an attack on America.
ReplyDeleteI watched the TV for most of the day.
I was heading in to Uni on the bus, feeling nervous but excited because I had my first date with Andrew. I ran into Russell Williams on the bus & he said 'haven't you seen the news?'. We cancelled our usual main meeting so we could pray about the tragedy. It was such a surreal week, having a whirlwind romance and getting engaged with all that as background.
ReplyDeleteI walked into a staff meeting that morning, late as usual, and everyone was talking about it - I had to ask them to explain. No a very productive staff meeting that day!
ReplyDeleteI was watching The West Wing and couldn't believe what I was seeing when it was interupted. I called Rob who was working in Sydney. I watched the coverage for a while and then tried to get soem sleep. I was woken very early (3ish) by my MIL with the news. I was worried about what else could have possibly happened when the phone rang.
ReplyDeleteI found out watching the news at breakfast time. I was teaching Year 6 in those days. ALL the kids knew about it by the time we got to school. One of the girls had a bestfriend who had moved to the US recently and her dad worked in one of the towers. He never made it home. My husband was on a two-month work assignment in Saudi Arabia, near Mecca. They brought all their people back within the week. I didn't think that was necessary at the time - after all, who was going to bomb Saudi?
ReplyDeleteAt a friend's 40th birthday party. Someone from her family called to say turn the TV on. Changed the party in an instant - we just sat around watching in shock.
ReplyDeleteWe are so insulated in our society. Just think, whenever we see one of those seemingly almost daily reports of bombings somewhere in the world, there are people hearing about it with the same gut-wrenching shock we all felt that day.
ReplyDelete