I was at university in Edinburgh, Scotland, waiting until December when I would be able to play SOL back in America during my winter vacation.
I finally got to play it on December 18th... I got home from the airport, setup the new bigscreen TV and surround system I ordered just for MGS2 (cost me like 2 grand, but will serve it's purpose again for MGS3!) and said to myself, Okay, I'll go to sleep early tonight and get up and play it all day tomorrow. But of course, what did I do? I took one look at the box and couldn't resist. I played up until the Olga fight, then saved and went to bed. Then the next day I started it up again. Very memorable game for me. The wait was hard, especially knowing everyone else was playing it in America, and I also hadn't been looking at any info on the game for over a year, but it was worth it. I'll never forget how blown away I was when the Plant chapter started and I realized there was another playable character.
An interesting note, when I first started up the game and saw the intro, I thought the blond hair character fighting back to back with Snake at the end was Liquid... I thought they had somehow temporarily teamed up to defeat Solidus. Again I hadn't seen the trailer with Ocelot and Liquid's arm, so I thought Liquid was in the game as a full human. So seeing that made me very excited to play the game and see what would happen.
MGS3 will work out similar for me, except this time I'm going back to the US for winter vacation from Japan, not Scotland... And this time I plan to play the Japanese version first, because I love Akio Otsuka, the Japanese voice actor for Snake.