As deadly gunfire and explosions rattled Paris on Friday night, Canadians around the city sought shelter, housed victims and played witness to the carnage.
Inside the Stade de France stadium, Canadian Aaron Watkins heard two "bangs" over the noise of soccer fans cheering on their national team.
At first, he told CTV News Channel, he didn't know what was happening.
"My initial reaction was just 'Wow, what's that?'" he said. "And then as the news started coming in on Twitter and the media, the mood of the game and my mood changed very quickly. I was getting very worried and I think everyone there was too."
As attackers bombed and opened fired at six locations around the city, killing 132 people, the soccer match played on.
"At no point did the game stop," Watkins said. "Even after the game, the scoreboard lit up and they told everyone that there's been an incident and to please leave through these two exits 鈥� they didn't publicly announce that there were attacks."
The crowd filtered down through the stands and pooled around the exits, Watkins said. And then, confusion broke out.
"Right when we were about close to the gates, someone yelled or someone screamed and everyone started panicking and running around," he said. "I thought somebody was trying to shoot everyone in the stadium and I tried to run for cover. It was like a stampede. People were pushing, running, screaming and crying."
The crowd gathered on the field and waited until police gave the clear to leave the building.
One fan told the Associated Press: "We preferred to stay on the field. That's where we felt safest."
While Watkins and his fellow soccer fans huddled on the pitch, Canadians elsewhere in Paris were also witnessing the chaos in the city.
According to Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, there doesn't appear to be a Canadian connection to the events, and no Canadians are believed to have been killed.
But an estimated 12,000 Canadians are living in France right now, and many use the capital as their home base.
An Ottawa man, James Drummond, was relaxing at home when a couple of friends barged through the door at about 10 p.m.
Drummond said his friends had been planning to have dinner at Le Petit Cambodge that evening, but stopped for drinks across the street first.
From there, they saw a gunman emerge and open fire on the popular restaurant.
They ran back to Drummond's home and he took them in as gunfire and explosions erupted outside.
"While we were not on the streets, you could definitely hear the commotion that was going on down below," he said. "My friends were obviously very rattled."
Elsewhere in the city, a Vancouver woman also helped provide shelter from the violence.
Cherie Hanson was in Paris for an Airbnb conference when she and her hosts heard explosions and gunfire coming from the nearby Bataclan concert hall.
鈥淲e heard three loud explosions, like they were grenades,鈥� she said. 鈥淭hen the machine-gun firing started. It was continuous, quite fierce. People were running into the street to try and escape. They were crying out and screaming.鈥�
Hanson鈥檚 hosts took in a journalist who had been shot in the thigh.
"He was bleeding. He was in a great deal of pain," she said.
But despite his injury, he kept reporting.
"He sat in the chair with his left arm elevated and continued to phone in his story with his cellphone in his right hand," she said.
As police contained the situation and the streets calmed, Canadians in Paris say they woke up on Saturday to a different city.
"The streets (were) basically empty," Canadian Tyler Bryant told CTV Vancouver. "It's kind of ghostly and unnerving."
Another Canadian, Montreal-based Henry Francois Gelot, also described the city as strangely quiet on the morning after.
"There's not one soul on the street," he said. "It's kind of a 鈥� traumatizing situation that we're living in."
But despite the initial caution, Watkins, who attended the soccer game on Friday night, urged Canadians and French alike not to let the attacks scare them into silence.
"One thing I've learned is that we have to stay strong 鈥� we can't be scared because that's the first thing that terrorists want to happen," he said. "We have to stay strong, pray for the ones that have fallen and we need to keep living life."
With files from CTV Vancouver, CTV Ottawa, and CTV News Channel
