Craig worked from home today so that he wouldn't have to fight traffic in the afternoon. I left work at 3:00. It was snowing a bit when Craig's mom dropped us off at the airport . The dropoff area at the airport was very congested with limos, and we had to doublepark and quickly hop out. There must have been some special gathering going on as there were limos everywhere we looked. Fortunately, there was absolutely no line at check-in or security. While eating some food at Burger King we had a clear view of the security area. Craig and I noticed a woman getting searched by a man. We normally wouldn't even think of such a thing but both of us realized that the man was searching the woman very closely. We both felt that the way he was touching her was highly inappropriate and clearly out of line. After coming home to Boston we learned that this very thing was now in the news and there were many complaints about it. We had to agree based of what we actually witnessed. After eating we headed to the American Airlines gate which sported the huge neon eagle. There was a new Dunkin Donuts in this area and we got honey dipped crullers. While at home we adhere to a pretty strict diet so vacations are a good excuse to eat whatever comes to mind. Burger King and then Dunkin Donuts. We were off to a good start. We decided to change some money so that we would have some Euros when we arrived in Berlin. I went to the kiosk and did business with a girl on her cell phone who wasn't paying any attention to me. She probably should have.
We boarded the flight at 6:15 pm, and it was still lightly snowing. This was our first real snow of the season, and it was causing a backup at the airport. We were third in line for de-icing. The guy in the bucket truck outside the window waved to us. We were on a 777 and it had lots of legroom. There were individual TV's in the seatbacks. Our choices of movies included "The Notebook" (we didn't watch it on the way to Vancouver and we're not going to watch it here), "Anchorman", and the remade "Manchurian Candidate." Even though this flight was taking us only as far as London, the safety video was in both English and German. We picked up a couple of new words: "schwimvest" means life jacket and "handy" means cell phone. The de-icing caused a slight malfunction with the auxiliary power, and the emergency lighting came on. It began to seem like we would never be taking off. We started to worry about our connecting flight in London, but the pilot said that he thought we would make up some time. All told, we were delayed by about two hours. There were a couple of older ladies behind us who were talking extremely loudly about Rush Limbaugh, and the controls for the TV screens (which, granted, were a bit annoying because they were in the armrest and you couldn't rest your arm without changing a channel) had them baffled. They were the kind of people who had their headphones on and would then speak ten times louder than normal. Many folks on the plane would look our way and smile knowing that at least they didn't have them right behind their own seats.
Soon after takeoff we were given a dinner of tender beef, rice, salad, and chocolate cake. They gave us free headphones and we decided to watch "The Manchurian Candidate." We have never seen the original, but we enjoyed this version very much. It really made the time go by quickly, and seemed especially relevant given the state of the world today. It was unedited. Throughout the flight there were flight details projected on the large screen at the front of the cabin. We had been flying at 39000 feet and 650 mph. The outside temperature was -83 degrees F but it was nice and comfortable inside. We managed to doze for a couple of hours.
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