Hundreds of thousands of Haitians slept outside the piles of rubble that were once their homes for yet another night, while many journalists and aid workers slept outside damaged hotels as they reported from Port-au-Prince.
Dogs barked through the night, gunshots sometimes rang out and mosquitoes buzzed loudly around messy heaps of snoring bodies.
As more journalists arrived, including some who had previously slept on airport tarmac now lined with air-conditioned army tents, the sound of electricity generators joined the night-time activity.
Wailing, singing and angry shouting from preachers rang out at dawn as survivors of the earthquake sought strength for another day.
After a while, some hotel residents crept back into rooms with cracked or crumbling walls, seeking uninterrupted sleep.
An early morning aftershock, preceded by a loud rumble, shook beds, provoked screams and sent most outside again. Haitians whose homes had not collapsed said they would never return inside.
Later in the day, some smashed water pipes on the streets to wash. Many hotel residents lathered up in the greying swimming pool to remove thick layers of dust and grime.
Barack Obama is a politician for the grand stage, the pulsating speech, the historic pronouncement. 
It took just seconds of bone-jarring, ground-shaking, concrete-rendering terror for Haiti to go from a forgotten and dirt-poor corner of the Caribbean to the only world headline that mattered.
New Year for me this year was pretty wild, but not in the conventional sense. To see in 2010 I abandoned my friends celebrating on one of Thailands famed beaches to watch the clock tick down to midnight in the kingdoms bizarre version of the Wild West.
You can imagine how colleagues reacted when told I was swapping Washington's bitter holiday season chill to cover President Barack Obama in Hawaii, from a hotel on a palm-tree fringed beach lapped by azure seas.
Gruesome pictures of bloodstained banknotes spread across the half-naked, bullet-ridden body of top drug lord Arturo Beltran Leyva have raised controversy over Mexico's military crackdown on its drug gangs.
The story about Sean Goldman, the nine-year-old Brazilian-American boy who flew back to the US with his father on Christmas Eve after being the football in a five-year custody battle, was a stirring tale chock full of determination and nationalistic indignation.
One of the things I was looking forward to when I came to Madrid more than two years ago was the chance to cover the America's Cup, which at that time was due to be held in 2009 in the Spanish port of Valencia.
Given that few US military officers stationed in Iraq speak Arabic fluently, there is a great deal of use of interpreters. In my experience, the vast majority of them are not only indispensable, but are also very good at what they do.
It was that priceless moment reporters hunt for, the one that crystallised the high stakes of the UN climate conference -- and the likely shortfall of its outcome.
Living and working in a region as ethnically diverse and conflict-ridden as the Caucasus means constantly having to walk a conversational tightrope. I was reminded of this recently, as reporting trips took me from our home base in Georgia first to Armenia and then a few weeks later to Azerbaijan.
One of my favourite books is 'Big Game, Small World'. In it, the author, a columnist for Sports Illustrated, travelled the world just playing basketball, meeting people and interacting with them by shooting hoops.
For critics who love to hate the media, do not read any further. For those who want only to read more about Tiger's philandering, this blog isn't for you either.
Visual stunts have been a fun ingredient at the UN climate talks. We've had melting ice sculptures, red-suited "debt collectors" demanding rich countries pay their dues for global warming, activists making a dent in the waters of Copenhagen harbour, candlelit vigils... the works.
"The developing countries' individual mitigation action could in aggregate yield a [Y percent] deviation in [2020] from business as usual and yielding their collective emissions peak before [20XX] and decline thereafter."
Two years ago, trying to line up an interview with a Chinese delegate at a UN climate conference was like trying to open a safe with a paper clip.
The climate talks might be splashed across news websites right now, but battling the greenhouse effect is not the top priority for Brazilians, according to a survey.
I had to smile today when I walked past a string of booths at the climate conference. There they were: BINGO, TUNGO, ENGO and RINGO, all in a row.