I'm from Brazil, first of all. Back in september 2001 I was in college taking classes during the morning and working on a B2C website the rest of the day. It was my second year at college. I am not exactly sure, but from what I've calculated later, the moment the first plane hit the towers I was going from the campus cantina into a classroom located at the third floor of an old building, climbing some stairs talking with some other students. It was an Advanced Math II class (not sure how it would be translated into english), which took almost 3 hours that morning. After some time, a late student got into the class, and sat behind me.

"Have you guys heard that the United States are under attack? Two terrorist driven planes have hit the World Trade Center towers, another one has hit the Pentagon, and there's still more in the air!"

My first thought was "nonsense", but then I felt he had no reasons to be lying. I remember thinking "this can't be good, but maybe it's not that bad as it seems". The news spread across the classroom fast, and the professor interrupted the class and asked what was going on. We told him, and he said "Well I'm not sure about the WTC towers, but if the Pentagon has been hit, that is by itself a war statement...".

The towers had colapsed by the time the class was over. As it ended, we hurried down to the cantina, empty by now. A TV set was on, and we could see CNN images showing NY under this huge cloud of smoke and dust. "God damn!", I thought, as I realized it was worse than I thought. By then, I thought it was worse than it really was, judging by those first images I thought NYC had been completely destroyed!

I quickly found a computer at a lab and emailed a friend in the US, while I tried to access some webpages to know more about it. CNN had this static small webpage running, yahoo was very slow... Even penny arcade had removed their content!

Me and a coleague went to lunch at a small place outside the university, and as we walked we were talking on what could possibly happen after this day. We ate looking at the TV screens, as were everyone at the place.

I left to my job in my car, listening to the radio. As I got to the office I didn't see anyone from my department (the IT one), they were at a meeting room watching the news on TV. Back then the B2C section of that company (a major retailer corporation) was located at a single floor and I used to work right next to the marketing department guys. I was all day listening to their coments on how GWB would act, and stuff like that, on who had done it... I couldn't web surf too much so I didn't have much information about it. As I left work at night, I heard on the radio that name, for the first time... "it all indicated that the action taken was commanded by Osama Bin Laden", said by a NY correspondent live. I kept listening to it until I got back.

for the rest of the day, I was pretty much watching the news on TV< seeing the images over and over again... Still not understanding what I was seeing... Unaware of the future consequences...