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When Bad Stuff Happens, Is It Better To Be At Home?
Most people can remember where they were when events of major importance happened like 9/11 or the Columbia space shuttle tragedy. When such events occur, the best place to be is usually at home surrounded by friends and family.
August 31 is the tenth anniversary of the death of Princess Diana. In August 1997 I was travelling alone in Eastern Turkey and got to a cheap hotel in Erzurum after a long bus trip from the Black Sea coast.
The lobby of the Ornek Hotel was filled with locals watching TV, but the grainy images and Turkish commentary didn't really make clear what had happened. I managed to work out from the guy at reception that "Prince Charles' girlfriend" had died, but given Charles and Di's marriage was already over this still didn't tell me anything definitive.
Gradually snippets on TV, (remember this was before the days of widespread Internet), told the full story, and a few days later I was in another cheap hotel in Sanliurfa near the Syrian border watching Elton John sing his reworked "English Rose" at Diana's funeral.
Now I'm not a big fan of Elton, and definitely not a royalist, but I was sitting in my spartan accommodation with tears streaming down my face. The combination of being away from home, and having no-one to share the event in my own language I guess.
For American readers, what was it like if you were out of the States on September 11, 2001?
Thanks to bush to push on Flickr for the pic of Erzurum.
Filed under: History, Asia, Turkey, United Kingdom
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jamie Rhein Aug 31st 2007 11:50AM
When September 11 happened, we had been living in New Delhi for about a month. I was 5 months pregnant, and since we were teaching at the American Embassy School we were considered a soft target. School was cancelled the following day, and we all stayed glued to CNN watching the images over and over. I actually was watching the news when the second tower was hit. It was night for us. My brother lives in Manhattan and my cousin's husband worked at one of the buildings of the World Trade Center so I was terribly worried until I heard that they were safe. I was also worried about my cousin who lives and works in D.C. Because we worked with so many Americans in India, there was a huge sense of rallying around and sharing news about each other's personal stories. Most of the diplomatic license plates of the school's fleet of cars that marked us as Americans were removed and the procedure for getting on campus was tightened. Since we lived on campus, the extra security felt to me like I was living in a fortress that had ceased to be so friendly.
Christian Aug 31st 2007 2:15PM
I was in Portugal on my honeymoon on 9/11. We had just gotten off a train from Lisbon to Porto, and when we got into the hotel room I turned on the TV, to see one of the towers burning. The anchors on the BBC World feed didn't know what had happened, and as we unpacked I mentioned the plane that had flown into the Empire State building back in the day.
Then we watched live as the 2nd plane hit. At that point we started to freak out, trying to get a hold of people we knew in New York City, including our 9-month pregnant friend, to make sure she was OK. We also tried calling one of our friends in San Francisco, telling them not to go to work (she worked right near the Transamerica Building and there was lots of talk about the possibility of other US landmark buildings being targeted).
I think both my wife & I went into shock for a while and we felt unbelievably alone, cut off from our frinds & family. We eventually decided we needed to turn off the TV and get out of the hotel room, so we went down to a nearby restaurant, picked up a pack of cigarettes (looks like I had quite the wrong week to give up smoking) and started wandering the streets. It was very surreal to be walking around with the knowledge of what had happened, knowing that most of the people walking by had no idea the towers had fallen, unless they had happened to turn on a TV in the middle of the day, which I assume most of them had not.
The guide book we had said there was a cybercafe in a nearby office building and we headed there to try to check/send emails and get on The Well, where we knew our NYC friends would check in if they could. Turns out the cyber cafe wasn't there anymore. As we stood on the sidewalk, sort of dazed & confused, a woman came up to us.
"You are American?" she asked. We considered whether or not we should answer truthfully or not; we had no idea what other peoples' reactions would be.
We needn't have worried; in her broken English she told us how sorry she was about what had happened and basically asked if there was anything she could do to help us. We told her we had been looking for this cybercafe so we could check our emails, and she told us to follow her -- she took us up to her office in the building and let us use her desktop computer. She told us to take as long as we needed to make sure our friends were OK.
I'll never forget the kindness that this woman showed to a couple of total strangers, standing on the sidewalk in front of her office building in Porto.
After we had gotten through (via email) to some people and we knew that everyone we were worried about was safe, we went back out on the streets. A little while later, we happened upon the most amazing thing -- apparently a circus/theatre troupe was in town and to drum up business for their show they were parading through town, juggling and doing skits and generally making fools of themselves. We ended up following them (Teatro do Elefante) through the streets of Oporto for hours. It was exactly what we needed -- something to take our minds off what was happening and remind of the joyful reason we were in Portugal for the first place.
We ended up leaving Oporto a day early -- the city was too fraught for us to really enjoy it -- and headed to the beach a day early. We spent a week on the beach, eating amazing Alentejano food, before we took the train back to Lisbon to head home.
For a while we weren't sure when we'd be able to go home, since US airspace was closed for several days, but they reopened to routes a day before our departure and we made it to the airport, a pretty weird place to be -- it was the first time (though not the last) I would see police with submachine guns guarding the gates. We got on our plane (after an immigration agent freaked us out by asking, jokingly it turned out, if my wife's teddy bear had her papers) and headed to an eerily deserted JFK airport and eventually home.
It turned out to be quite an eventful honeymoon, and not just for the reasons we'd hoped.
Justin Glow Aug 31st 2007 5:15PM
Great story, Christian.