(I have tried to help Mr. Lennon out by compensating for some of his lack of imagination.)
I was in Europe when the attacks happened -- Paris, specifically. My friends and I wanted to come home, of course, but nobody was up for immediate air travel, for obvious reasons, so we were stuck there for a couple weeks.
The first we heard about it was a French souvenir vendor telling my friend, "I'm so sorry about what happened to your country." During all the rest of our stay in France and Italy, the support and sympathy was amazing. Every shop had an American flag, and signs saying "We Are All Americans" were everywhere. It sounds surreal now, after passing through the era of "Freedom Fries" and "surrender monkeys," but there was a brief time when the world's hearts were fully with America ... until we decided to invade a couple of countries, one of them completely unrelated to the attacks, and caricature every country that disagreed with us as cowards and terrorist sympathizers that didn't deserve to have their names on our fast food.
If we ever decide waffles are our enemy, I suggest renaming these "Cartesian grid fries."
My best memory of the trip was in Paris, before the attacks. Our group of six friends went to my cousin's little apartment and shared a delicious home-cooked meal with my cousins, their spouses, and my aunt and uncle. There wasn't a single language we shared between us. I thought of making a Venn diagram of who spoke what, but it made my head explode. Everybody spoke at least two languages, but nobody spoke the same two. There was English, French, Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, and I think someone pulled out a little German? Every time you turned to talk to someone else, you switched languages, sometimes having to find a third person to bridge the gap. But it never felt like a barrier; it felt like a wonderful game among good friends, even though most of these people had just met. I still smile looking back at it.