Do you remember when you first realized you were experiencing what would be historical events?

I realized that I was living through history the day that the Berlin Wall came down. My cousin (23) and I (16) were in Berlin during school break. We had just got back from East Berlin when we heard loud noises outside of our hotel. When we asked someone what was happening, we were told that the Wall was no more. I will always remember the joy that I saw on Berliner's faces and the hope for the future I felt that day.

9/11, I still remember that day as it was yesterday. Although I did not witness the actual plane crashed into the twin tower. I did witness an empty highway, all the way from Orange County, CA to San Diego, CA. I had an eerie feeling that I was caught in the twilight zone because at the start of 5:30am, rush hours begins to start and on that particular day, there was basically no cars on the freeway. And I encounter maybe a total of 10 cars all the way from OC to SD in either direction. Not until I reached the based did I realize something was drastically wrong when it took me 2 hours to get to the front gate just to be told about what happened to the US.

Even though I remember living through the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King, and RFK, and the Vietnam War I did not realize that I was living through what would be history until later. So time in my late 20's when I was serving during the Cold War I realized that I was living through history. After that point I started keeping a journal and recorded significant events in my life. I realized that future historians and archaeologists will be interested in what average people did in the 20th and 21st centuries.