Who would’ve guessed that I would be here now in the United States, and in particular, Washington DC of all places. But on this day 5 years ago, I was in Vancouver, sleeping in parent’s basement. That morning, my mom woke me up and told me to turn on the TV. I felt confused about what was going on. I was still in school and I remember constantly refreshing all the web sites to try and find out what was going on, which was an exercise in futility, since all the web sites were overloaded. CNN.com went down many times until they switched their homepage to just an image and a paragraph of text.

Even all the way over in Vancouver BC, I remember Starbucks closing early and sending all their employees home early. I remember the kindness of strangers, as everybody pitched in to help and comfort each other with what they could. Canadian airports and cities all along the Pacific and Atlantic coast started to fill up with overseas flights originally inbound for the United States because of the no-fly restrictions. I remember even airports way up in the Yukon territories took in some flights, which was troublesome because the airports up there didn’t have the proper equipment and infrastructure to service large overseas flights.

All the TV channels switched over and started to broadcast cable news for at least the next 2 weeks. It was surreal, every station was broadcasting the exact same thing.

So that’s where I was. Where were you?

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Another update: Less than 24 hrs after coming up with the idea, putting the site together, and launching it… the site has received over 750 responses and 3000 visits. No doubt this will all settle down as the week goes on, but nonetheless, this is turning out to be a pretty interesting spur of the moment side project.