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The problem with Virgin Atlantic is that they give you too many movies to choose from. For two people without cable, this can be a problem. I watched a couple of movies-- the Incredibles and Napoleon Dynamite, then some crappy TV. Both I would never have bothered to watch until they came on video to the Somerville Public Library. I don't even know what Chippy watched. . I didn't watch Bridget Jones' diary, and I didn't watch Fahrenheit 911. . For me, Heathrow is an interesting place, full of some scary-ass memories. Most of you know that I got stuck in London after September 11th. For me, going back was really eerie. . I was on a Virgin flight back to Boston after some crazy times at Alex and Mary's wedding and then some more crazy times with Travis and Biz in London. We had stayed up all night, and I barely made it to the plane, the morning of 9/11. Luckily, it was about an hour delayed, so I sat with my hangover in the airport lounge for a while. I was pretty unhappy that morning. To say the least. . Got on the plane, watched Bridget Jones' diary, and halfway across the atlantic, the chainsmoking biologist next to me said "the plane has turned around. This is weird." And showed me the digital image of the plane's progress across the atlantic-- it took a big U-Turn. They turned off the screen a minute later, and then they made the announcement. . People started crying, desperate for news about family members, desperate to know that we (in the air, halfway across the atlantic) were not a terrorist target ourselves. I came to find out later that the airports in Nova Scotia, Iceland, etc. were all full. We were lucky (maybe?) enough to have barely enough fuel to make it back to London. . We circled over London on fumes, until finally they let us land. We had to go back through customs, and as we were one of the last planes that were allowed to land in Heathrow, we had to wait for a few hours in the lounge until they let us stand in line at customs-- they made us go back through customs. I felt very lonely, alone, scared, but the biologist tried to help me as much as he could. . My sister was living in New York at the time, working in Manhattan. And because there was such a lack of news (no TV, just people talking on their cell phones and announcing it to the rest of us, all exaggerated hearsay), we had no idea what had actually happened, how much damage their was. For all we knew, Manhattan had fallen into the ocean, and the entire city was burning. For all I knew, my sister was dead. And all of the people trying to phone the U.S. were not getting through. . Hours and hours later, I was back at Trav's house with Biz. His plane hadn't left the ground, so he made it back many hours earlier. Trav had called my mother earlier and let me know when I first contacted him that Anna was safe. Immediately he then contacted my mom and PChippy-- At the time, he was even afraid that I was dead-- all he knew was that I was in the air when it happened. . The point of my story is that every time I went into a different place in Heathrow, the memories came flooding back. This is the hall that I ran down to catch the plane in the first place. This is where I chainsmoked cigarettes waiting for the bus. This is the same paisly carpet that I stood on as I went through customs for the second time. This is what the Central Line trains looked like as I saw the guy's newspaper with the burning towers on the front cover of his paper. I was too numb to borrow it from him to find out what happend. Too scared for my own safety, even, as the London Underground was filled with bobbies with machine guns. All of the memories of place were really vivid, down to the smells, the feelings. Almost like the entire 48 hours were so deeply imprinted in my mind that I was overwhelmed every time I went someplace else, even 4 years later. . Because they didn't have the 50 channel options available in 2001, I watched Bridget Jones' Diary twice, once halfway across the ocean towards Boston, once halfway across the ocean toward London. I had shut down. I didn't know what to think. I was numb. I couldn't think about anything else except for, "am I even going to get on the ground, or are we going to get bombed in the air?" "thank you, I will have another drink." We couldn't get any news, as all of the radio frequeny was filled up with pilots trying to keep their charges safe. . In the end, I made it back to Boston after about a week of dealing with all of the tragedy with travis and Biz. We rented a car, visited old friends of mine, were bought pints from symathetic Brits and cried a lot. My sister was safe (I have highlighted her in previous posts), and in the end, I just felt lucky. For myself, for my family, and lucky that I didn't lose anyone special to me in the tragedy. . But revisiting all of that was eye-opening, scary, and made me think, and it was a frightening, scary, experience, maybe like veterans visiting a battlefield.