What Were the Early 2000's for You?

What happened then, what you saw, what you learnt, what you enjoyed, what feared you ...
You are invited to share your experience of the early 2000's.

(Please, post each one in a separate post! Illustrative images are highly encouraged.)

...movies, music, events, travels, fashions, daily life things, world-wide things, everything and everywhere ... what stamped your life in 2000-03.

Let's see how the MoFoers lived the early 2000's.

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"Population don't imitate art, population imitate bad television." W.A.
"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." M.T.

To begin with...

In 2000, I bought my first mobile phone. It was Motorola, the model of the picture below:

Next in the row... Alice Cooper

In 2000 he was back, releasing the superb album Brutal Planet.
I bought the CD and loved it. One of my favorite albums of the new century.

▽
Happily, the tour following the release, passed through Sofia so on July 29th, 2000, I saw Cooper live during his Live from the Brutal Planet Tour. The concert was great, in front of about 10,000 people.
Here is the leaflet of the gig:

Playstation 2 Amazing


CD Burners and my desperate rush to archive all that vinyl and all those cassettes (only to find it all free on YouTube a few years later, LOL).

Yeah, CD burning was a regular thing in those years.

I wore out my analogue SONY burner with endless archiving. I had all these old tapes and records. I was desperately archiving 12 singles and mix tapes. All this stuff that I thought was "super rare." LOL. Computer burners were still pretty crunchy/compressed so I went with most expensive option as the time. Hindsight is 20-20. I thought for sure I was preserving tracks I would lose forever when the tape finally surrendered themselves to be gobbled up by the fickle gods of the tape heads which randomly mangle.

The early 2000's were the last years of the era of the old type cinema halls (movie theaters). There still were several in operation and we've actively visited them, twice a month at least.
These were the places we saw the newly released then productions like LOTR trilogy, The Pianist (2002), Mulholland Dr. (2001), American Psycho (2000), Dancer in the Dark (2000) and many more.

Almost all of these halls were closed around 2003-04 and people went in the newly-built Multiplexes.
Here pictures of two of the usual cinemas we've visited. The red one is still empty standing in the city center and the other was turned into a supermarket:

The beginning of the end.

__________________
5-time MoFo Award winner.

Fear, anger and stress. Talking 9/11 here watching the events from our conference room at work. Leaving work at noon, not a cloud in the sky here in Detroit. I remember the eerie silence and the huge pinwheels in the sky, made from fighter jets scrambled from nearby Selfridge AF base.

Not the answer you're looking for, but this rocked me for a very long time.

What Were the Early 2000's for You?

I got married! And honeymooned in the Tahitian islands which was the first time I'd ever traveled overseas. Awesome time being in the tropics, snorkeling in the super warm and clear waters.

Bought my first computer a very expensive Dell Dimension 8100 with the then super fast Pentium 4 1.4 ghz processor and don't laugh 256mb of ram. That computer cost over $2000, yikes!

Why is that the only two things I can think of?

Next in the row...

In 2002, I bought my first car. The German Opel Vectra, an older version. It served well our needs for five years.

the model was this one:

At the time, they didn't seem like much. But they ended up being the years right before I moved out and then met my eventual wife, so in retrospect they were extremely important.

2000 was a life changing year. I lost my best friend to a car accident before finals, skipped some, dropped out of college and crawled home in a slight depression. My escape for the next year was going to the movies a few times a week while renting the latest film release, while also finding time to occasionally play something on the PlayStation.

Actually, from 2000-2005 consisted of mostly going to the movies. With late night trips to the local club afterwards on Saturday nights to see the local band perform.

Know what? It was a fun time.

Terror. Or rather that’s what the adults at the table wanted us kids to feel.

I was in middle school at the time and every field trip was canceled because of overblown “risk assessments”.

Notable travels in this period...

In the end of 2001, I've visited Istanbul (Constantinople). One of the five cities of the Pentarchy where the western civilization has been launched.
We've had a great sightseeing in this eternal city.

▽ The Blue Mosque (left) and Hagia Sophia (the red one)


▽ Topkapı Palace


▽ The Bosphorus Strait, the meeting place of Europe and the Middle East.

How early we talking? I'll list the following for me that goes till 2006.

1. AOL Instant Messenger
2. High speed internet
3. Halo and Halo 2 hype
4. eBaumsWorld (didn't know at the time that he stole his content, when I found out, I never went back)
5. MySpace
6. [adult swim]
7. DVDs
8. The Lord of the Rings trilogy
9. Star Wars Episodes II and III
10. Spider-Man
...just to name a few. MoFo was also a big part of my early 2000s, with my coming here in 2003.

__________________
Everything I do, I do to make my second stepdad proud.

31 December 1999 - Wild party at my place
early 2000 - Great sex and travelled through Europe.
Mid 2000 - painful break up and discovered music that is now seen as bland and awful
late 2000 - made lifelong friends, joined a band, partied hard, had the best time of my life
late 2001 - met my wife. The rest is history

It is specified in the OP - early means 2000-2003.
I plan to launch a new thread for the mid-decade, if there is enough interest.