My National Television Debut

If you're wondering what this post is about from this title, don't get your hopes up too high. I didn't do anything extremely cool or interesting to deserve being on national TV. However (on accident), I did happen to be in the right place at the right time. When I was in Paris with some of my friends last year, we happened to be less than a mile away from an attempting terrorist attack at the Louvre. Luckily the French police were able to thwart the attacker, and there were no casualties. We should have known something was wrong when we heard police and ambulance sirens blaring incessantly, but we didn't find out that anything was wrong until our teacher from our study abroad program contacted us to tell us to stay away from the Louvre. We assured her that we hadn't been anywhere near the Louvre, and at that point we actually were telling the truth. Because of all of the security and police surrounding the museum, we knew it probably wasn't a good idea to go near the commotion.

After we learned of the attack we strolled around Paris and had a leisurely afternoon tea at Ladurée. I was in Paris with three of my friends and for two of them, it was their first time visiting Paris. I couldn't let them go to Paris without at least seeing the Louvre, so we decided to walk through the Tuileries and just go around the building so they could see the exquisite architecture. I guess the combination of our American accents and our clothes gave us away because as we were walking through the Tuileries, an attractive, middle aged man approached us. He asked us if we were American and why were in Paris. We could tell immediately that he was also American, and we started talking about the fact that we had all just come from London. He then asked if he could interview us, and (probably stupidly) we agreed without asking who he was or the purpose of the interview. He asked us a lot of questions about whether or not we were scared to travel as a result of the terrorist attack and if we were nervous to be in Paris. To our credit, I thought we had some insightful, mature responses saying that despite all of the scary things that were happening in Europe, we didn't want to be deterred from exploring new places or cultures because that only feeds into what terrorists want. After the interview we joked about that fact that we would never see that footage again, and it would probably end up in some backroom of a local news station somewhere.

Fast forward to later that night. My three friends had decided to go to sleep early while I visited one of my friends that lives in Paris. I was out relatively late, so I was awake when I got a text from my friend from school asking if I was ok. I had absolutely no idea what she talking about, so she sent me a picture of myself on television. What we had thought was a random interview ended up being on the ABC Nightly News. It had been broadcasted all throughout America, and immediately my friends and I were bombarded with texts from family members, and my friend who had been named on the news got a lot of Facebook messages from random people she had never met telling her to "stay safe abroad." Even though I found it extremely funny that we were on television, we also looked extremely stupid. Instead of using some of the good footage of us, the only response that they used was my friend saying, "We didn't want the fear of like something happening to keep us from not coming." They also told us they wanted footage of us walking towards the Louvre to use, and because we thought the situation of us being interviewed was funny at the time we couldn't help ourselves from smiling and laughing. But on television this footage was rolling as the voiceover was talking about the terrorist attack. So while we looked like we were trying to shoot a Covergirl commercial, we were really on a news story about a serious event.

I have to say that I never expected to be on national TV, and certainly not looking like a fool like I do in this video. However, I can now laugh about it, and the bonus is that I can always use it as my fun fact on the first day of class when teachers force you to say one in he class.

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/attack-louvre-officially-announced-terrorism-45260356

xx