Sorry, not so light a subject this time.
They say that everybody remembers where they were and what they were doing when they heard that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.
Tomorrow - more precisely around 2 am next night - it will be 20 years since M/S Estonia sank. Of the 989 on board, only 138 were rescued alive, one of them died later.
I remember where I was when I first heard it on the radio, putting on make-up in the morning to get ready to go to work. The first feeling was unbelief - this could not have happened. Everybody takes those cruise ferries to Sweden and back, nowadays also to Estonia and back, everybody knew what the vessels were like, everybody knew what kind of an atmosphere there would have been onboard during the evening before the disaster - jolly.
I also remember where I was when I first heard about the WTC attack - at work, discussing with a colleague, when the department secretary came in and said that somebody had flown an aeroplane right into a building in New York. There were no more details as yet, and I somehow thought it was a small plane and it was an accident. Trying to get some more information it was obvious that it was a huge thing - all the regular news sites that I used collapsed. Slowly they changed their frontpages into text only, and very few links, trying to cope with the traffic overload.
And one more, I remember where I was when I heard that Olof Palme had been murdered in February 1986. It was a sunny, cold Saturday morning, opened the radio and heard that there were flags half-mast and a minute of silence in a skiing event in Norway, but I didn't know yet why.
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What kind of world events have left that kind of a memory of time slowing down and noticing little insignificant details that you can clearly recall even decades later? Like the brain does not compute the actual happening but concentrates on secondary things.