Eight years ago today...

As we now know, our generation's "Where were you when...?" question, pertains to September 11, 2001. For me that day holds a completely different set of memories and feelings than most Americans since I experienced it in another country: France. I had only been in Aix-en-Provence for a little under a month when I walked out of my school on a gorgeous September afternoon not expecting anything other than a pleasant walk home. A man came up to me as soon as I stepped out into the street and in French asked if I was an American. When I said, "Oui.", he stuck a microphone in my face and began to bombard me with questions on how I felt about what had happened in New York. Mind you, at that point in time I was long from being fluent in French and I was only able to catch a few words here and there. Words like, "planes", "crash", "towers", "New York", "Pentagon", etc., etc. When it was finally clear to this man that I had absolutely no idea of what he was talking about, he asked me if I had heard the news. Meanwhile, my friends who spoke even less French than I did, were frantically asking me what the man was saying. I told them it had something to do with planes crashing into the World Trade Center but I didn't believe the words as they came out of my mouth. Somehow I had to be mistaken. Alas, this was not the case. The man who I later realized was a reporter told me I should get to a television as soon as possible. We all ran to the nearest bar and the bar owner was kind enough to switch the channel to CNN in English. We all stood there and watched in horror at what looked like a movie. We were just in time to watch as the second tower collapsed on live TV. The next few days will forever solidify my belief that French people are lovely, generous, and kind. The school set up a dozen phones that were made available to us free of charge so that we could contact our families back home and on more than one occasion, I had people come up to me and tell me how sorry they were about what had occured in my country. Plus, the city of Aix held a city wide 5 minutes of silence for the people who lost their lives on that tragic day. So even if I sometimes feel left out of conversations where Americans talk about what it felt like to be in the U.S. with no airplanes overhead, a somber mood throughout the country, and the taping of curtains and windows, I'm glad that I was in such a country as France.