I was living with a family in a suburb to Bath in the UK, the son in the family and me was with his friends Bristol for a day, when they suddenly started talking about bombs, yep this was the London bombings in 2005...
At first I didn't realize what happened, I am Swede and English is my second language, so I had a bit of trouble actually understanding it all.
When we got back home, I called my parents who were in Canada on vacation at the time, they were at a restaurant and had not heard the news yet, so they were very confused but happy that I was fine.
I can just imagine them at a restaurant, getting a call from their son calling to say that he is ok and not to worry with zero context and then hearing about the attacks that way, that must have been quite surreal, but also ment that they was never worried.