Most nations have days in the year which mark anniversaries of high symbolic character. Most Americans , at least all i know can clearly remember what they were doing on 9/11 where they were etc., when the planes struck the WTC. If you ask Germans about November 9th 1989 , the fall of the Berlin wall, the result will be similar. Almost everybody can come up with an account of that day. What about sharing such stories, also about important days in other nations or about other occasions ?
Here is mine :
In November 1989 I was living in Daressalam /Tansania. My parents were working for medicines sans frontieres / doctors without borders there and i was going to an international school. We were living in a quarter of the city with a mostly foreign population, aid workers, doctors , diplomates etc. Since the cold war had not ended then and Tansania was the country of president Julius Nyerere, the father of "African socialism" a large number of these people was from eastern bloc countries , including the GDR. Especially those "westerners" in official positions were quite anxious not to be seen too close with people from the other side, which could have resulted in espionage suspicions etc. So contact between eastern and western Germans was almost zero. One reason was surely that since the GDR was facing continously facing the problem of qualified people changing over to the west those stationed abroad had a record of beeing convinced communists , had to leave their families behind in eastern Germany or were working for intelligence agencies or something like that.
We had quite nice american neighbours on the one side and on November 9th they invited me, who was eleven at that time to a plane safari. We were flying over the Savannes and took fotos of Elephants, Gnus , Giraffes etc.. In the evening i was brought back to my parents door, only to see most of the eastern and western german community in Daressalam sitting in my parents living room, drinking russian wodka and eastern german champagne ( horrible !) and extremely thrilled listening to Deutsche Welle radio, since the TV wasn´t working. The wall also had come down in their minds. A day before these guys probably wouldn´t have looked at each other, and now some of the cold warriors lay in each others arms and cried.
I was too young to fully understand what had happenend , i mostly knew that my granddad had fled from the GDR and that it was somehow bad therefore although i didn´t feel hostile. But I fully remember this enourmous sense of relief and happiness among the adults who hadn´t thought that the wall might come down during their lifetime and who especially didn´t think that a reeunion would take less than a year.

I was sitting in MEPS in Brooklyn, NY, getting ready to leave for boot camp. The date was January 20, 1981.

That was the day that the hostages were released in Tehran...

Steve