People old enough to remember the September 11 attacks, what was the day like?

Absolutely surreal.

I was in Amsterdam (used to live there in my teens/20s) and I was walking home with my boyfriend. We noticed a bunch of people in a bar just crowded around a tiny TV and we thought it was a soccer game or something until we noticed that one lady was crying. We walked in and saw footage of the plane hitting one of the towers (not live footage, I don't think) and I remember thinking it was like, commercials or something and that was a trailer for a movie or something like that. Then I looked around and saw everybody's faces and it "clicked" that that was a real thing that was happening. The rest of that evening is a blur, the only thing I remember is that it was just so quiet on the way home. There were people walking and everything, but no one was talking, no one was smiling, everybody looked like they were in a hurry to get home. All the way across the ocean and everybody was scared anyway. And we were just in shock, we got home and just sat there watching TV. We knew it had happened but we just didn't seem able to process it as a real thing that actually happened, it's very hard to describe how it felt.

/r/AskReddit Thread