※ 引述《peter00151 (夜濁漂)之銘言： (sorry I ate all the previous text [burp]) : So what do you guys think? Hi All, I'm new here, will post an intro later. Anyway, I was IN MANHATTAN on 9/11. I was staying with a friend at Columbia University, on 125th St. I was in New York for a few days, to see the sights and have some fun... Anyway, he rushed in on that morning and shouted at me, "OMG we gotta go, they just bombed the World Trade Center!" I rolled over in bed and replied, "Dude I'm still sleeping here." He booted up his computer, went to the CNN homepage, and made me look at it. CNN didn't have much to say on the morning of 9/11, but the photo was enough. I got up. I asked him what he wanted to do. He said we needed to get out of town, and that we can use my car to leave the city. I reminded him that my car was parked in Queens (too hard to find parking in Manhattan) but he wanted to leave the city no matter what, so we decided to go to Queens, get my car, and leave. Public transport was entirely shut down - all buses and subway lines. A taxi took us to about 60th St., but couldn't go further down because the police had set up barricades to block all traffic. So we followed a crowd - I guess many people wanted to leave Manhattan no matter what - and walked out of Manhattan on the Queensboro Bridge. From the bridge we could see smoke billowing from lower Manhattan. People around us were frightened, quiet, subdued. People kept looking over their shoulders at the faraway smoke, even as they walked out of Manhattan. It was a quiet exodus of New Yorkers, fearful for the future and uncertain about the now. Cell phone service was nearly nonexistent, as the huge number of calls had paralyzed the network. I couldn't get through to any of my other friends in Manhattan. I could only walk away. My friend and I arrived in Queens after the long walk, and he'd calmed down a bit by then. We decided to have some food at a Chinese restaurant, because it had a big TV mounted, and we could watch CNN. The clip of the planes flying into the Twin Towers had a movie-like quality; I kept expecting it to be the preview of a new Hollywood blockbuster and not a real event. TV crews reported that a plane also hit the Pentagon, and one more plane crashed somewhere. No one knew what was really going on. Everyone's eyes were glued to the big TV on the wall. People were hungry for news, any news, about the tragedy. CNN showed clips of people jumping off the Towers and someone in the restaurant gasped. Finally, the infamous clip of the Towers collapsing appeared on our TV. Tiny whispers of "Oh my God" can be heard in the restaurant. The restaurant was otherwise deathly quiet during that clip. No clinking of silverware against china, no hubbub of kitchen work, no conversation, no service, just this solemn silence as Americans and immigrants watched the Twin Towers crumble into the billowing dust. The world has changed. [We went to downtown Manhattan a few days later, but weren't allowed to approach within a 10-block radius of Ground Zero. Everything smelled like ash. Dust was everywhere, and the normally busy streets were deserted.] -- 'Cause it's a bittersweet symphony, this life Trying to make ends meet, You're a slave to money then you die -Bittersweet Symphony, The Verve --

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