My 9/11 Story

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 friends & 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 cybercafe 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 and the pedestrians who gathered to watch them. We ended up following them (Teatro do Elefante) through the streets of Porto 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 Porto 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 us if my wife's teddy bear had her papers -- we were not expecting jokes!) and headed back to the States. We landed at JFK on the day that the TWA/American merger was finalized -- the people behind the counter were asking each other if they'd gotten their pink slips yet -- and made our connection through the Pan Am Terminal. The airport was almost completely empty, and I still remember walking through one of the modernist concourses and being the only people in it. It was like Logan's Run. We got on our plane, paid for an upgrade to business class (it was the end of our honeymoon after all), and enjoyed fresh-baked cookies on our overnight flight home.

It turned out to be quite an eventful honeymoon, and not just for the reasons we'd hoped.