Those over a certain age are remembering where they were when Apollo 11 landed on the moon fifty years ago today. I was 13 and in London, where I had arrived the day before with my family (driving from Italy and France; we crossed the Channel from Calais to Ramsgate, in the hovercraft). We were staying with relatives, on Pennine Drive in NW2, all watching the telly. I remember the first live image of the spacecraft on the ground and, at 2:40 AM on the 21st, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin emerging from the vessel. My mother and I went outside and pointed up at the moon, me excited and probably saying “there they are!”
I likewise remember—as a snapshot image—when the three astronauts came to Ankara, Turkey—where I was living at the time—in October (three months to the day after the landing; it was a sunny afternoon), on their world tour, of them waving to the multitudes from an open-top sedan in the procession down Atatürk Boulevard, the city’s main thoroughfare. A large part of the city turned out to see them.
On the subject, there’s the movie First Man, which opened last October and was nominated for four Oscars (in technical categories, winning one, for ‘best visual effects’). If one doesn’t know it, it’s the first feature-length non-documentary film on the Apollo 11 mission, with Neil Armstrong (played by Ryan Gosling) at the center. I thought it very good and unexpected in its approach, as director Damien Chazelle opted not to make a classic ‘The Right Stuff’ kind of movie about the heroic march to the moon landing but instead meditate on the extreme dangers faced by NASA astronauts—who were taking their lives into their hands with each mission—and the psychological toll this took on them, their wives, and children (entre autres, the colleagues and friends who had perished in training and test flight accidents, not to mention the Apollo 1 disaster—and whose families were their friends—weighed heavily on all, as NASA in Houston was a tight-knit community). The Apollo missions, including the big one in July 1969, were anticipated by the astronauts and their families not with excitement but stoicism (for the former) and dread (the latter). And exhilaration did not necessarily follow the mission’s success. The subtext: history may be heroic but it is just as often tragic.
Arun with a View 
I was 22. We were broke. We spend our holidays in the Morvan. In hard core country. Like 10 miles from Chateau-Chinon. With my girl friend and her small child we had rented a small house that was almost a shack really. Electricity but no tap water. Water was at the well in the farm yard. The farmers were hard-working good people. They took foster children from the assistance publique in Nevers, which brought them a little cash money, but as the lady farmer said : “We – unlike others- don’t make them work for their food”. So on July 21st, we knocked at the door and asked if we could watch tv with them. There were at least 12 people already in the kitchen. Kids were sitting on the floor. Adults on benches, grandmas on armchairs. Cats were circulating. We drank ” la goutte” in small glasses which was powerful illegal home made prune. It was a small black and white tv with grainy images. A magic moment. An amazing blend of two different culture. I wish Neil Armstrong could have seen us.
Massilian: Merci pour le récit. As it so happens, we were likely within a dozen km of one another in the afternoon of 15 July 1969, me in the back seat of the car on the N6, heading toward Avallon (where the autoroute to Paris began at the time; we were coming from Italy). If we’d met at the time, I doubt we’d have had much to say to one another, with the age difference and my then non-existent French…
I remember ir very well – I was 17 and I was in my hometown, and my mom had passed away in March. It was my winter vacation, and I was kind of sad and lost there.