Quarantine Diaries, Day 31

22:00 Completely forgot to wash my hands after returning home. Don’t think I touched my face. Still, the horror. 😱

21:00 We now do groceries once every four days. I don’t think the capacity of our refrigerator would allow us to do it less frequently. Today’s grocery run was an exception. I had missed a few crucial things during the visit yesterday and decided to pop in after my evening walk. I’ve now begun to use the height of the stack of baskets at the entrance from which you must pick one, as a measure of how busy the store is. Three feet tall, the height this evening, means not at all. The notice to pick a basket used to be a hastily improvised thing, printed on a A4 sheet in Dutch and English and stuck to the turnstile with a sellotape. It had changed today to a more permanent thing printed on a big plastic placard in the store’s branding. This probably means that the social distancing measures are here to stay for a while.

The clerks at the checkout counters now have a large screen of transparent plastic screen in front of them to shield them from customers’ coughs and sneezes.¹

The self-checkout screen still tries to sell 5€ worth of air miles using a dark pattern. Not only am I going to have no use for air miles for the foreseeable future, I hate the one extra time I am forced to touch the screen to dismiss it.

Air miles

20:30 Encountered a lovely sunset on my walk this evening.

A beautiful sunset

April 15, 2020

Quarantine Diaries, Day 30

Toilet paper and hair clipper shortage will soon be joined by chalk shortage in Amstedam. Our courtyard and pavements are full of children’s chalk drawings and scribllings.

Chalk drawings

April 14, 2020

Quarantine Diaries, Day 29

15:00 Sudden temperature dips notwithstanding, it felt late enough today to wash, dry and pack away my two mufflers¹.

Mufflers

While folding them, I was reminded of this bizarre conversation we had with a total stranger at a pub a few months ago. We were paying our bill at the bar when this gentleman, who had had one drink too many, asked me about where I had got my scarf from (the one that looks like they were going for German flag). I told him it was a pretty ordinary mass manufactured thing from Uniqlo. He then went on to tell us how he had one exactly like that in his school days and asked us where we were from. It’s pretty futile to answer that with Amsterdam because inadvertently the question comes back as “But where are you originally from”, so India was my answer. At that point he told us about his love for tennis, Vijay Amritraj and asked me if we knew which James Bond film he had appeared in. I told him I hadn’t the foggiest clue (and till I looked it up later, I didn’t!)², said polite goodbyes and stepped out.

Funny that an article of clothing should tug at a random dormant memory.

14:00 The combination of sunny days and easter holidays got people out of their homes in numbers greater than governmental bodies monitoring the adherence to lockdown would like. They had to stop trains between Amsterdam and Rotterdam yesterday and tell people to get off because they had gotten too full. The trains here have been running less frequently and our national rail service has been requesting people to ride only if strictly necessary. When reduced train service doesn’t deter people from taking a ride, it creates precisely the conditions that social distancing is meant to avoid.

11:00 It finally happened today. The wife’s enthusiasm to give me a haircut met my increasing annoyance with bits of hair beginning to cover my ear. Since a trimmer has been hard to come by, she used a pair of scissors and comb to chop the offending bits of hair. It took us quite long to get through it, mostly because I kept giving her an earful to not chop bits of my ear.

09:30 The temperature dipped from a balmy 22ºC yesterday to a nippy 9ºC today. The cool spell is going to last a couple of days. I hope we get some rain too. While the winter last year was quite wet, we are off to a very dry start to the spring/summer season.

April 13, 2020

Quarantine Diaries, Day 28

(Posted 13 Apr 2020, 20:25)

19:00 On the way back from my evening walk, I saw a group of teenagers trimming each others’ hair with an electric clipper in our courtyard. Personal hygiene concerns aside, there was something atavistic about it, like social grooming rites of apes. When I told this to the wife she merely asked why I hadn’t queued up.

18:00 My iPhone has been my primary camera for several years now. Today I felt like shooting with my DSLR again and with the 24mm lens at that, which I probably hadn’t used in two years. Some pictures from the neighborhood that once housed warehouses and shipyards but is pretty residential now - though parts of it look every bit like they do in their 19th century daguerreotypes:

And by now there should be no doubts about what season it is here:

Some bridges here are so narrow that I waited at one end to let someone pass because it certainly won’t be possible to stay 1.5 meters apart if we were to pass by each other on the bridge:

10:00 I was already a month overdue for a haircut when the lockdown in Amsterdam began. A week into it the wife started to threaten to cut my hair at home. I’ve resisted her advances and even teased her with Regina Spektor’s song about Samson and Delilah:

A month in and I am beginning to relent. Based on the recommendation from a friend, the wife looked for a suitable hair clipper online but all of them were out of stock. If you’d said to me that a pandemic would cause a hair clipper shortage, I would’ve laughed at you.

Hair clippers are sold out online

I doubt they will be available for another month¹. Till then, I’ll continue to fantasize about the pony tail I’d be emerging out of this lockdown with.

April 12, 2020

Quarantine Diaries, Day 27

(Posted 12 Apr 2020, 23:39)

12:15 I didn’t check today, but two weeks ago, our local Saturday market was still operating. While the majority of stalls there sell food, you can find stalls selling pretty much anything from flowers, to clothes, to incense, to mobile phone covers and used books. Most of those stalls weren’t there any longer. The ones left had ample space between them.

Saturday market in the time of a pandemic

The stall from where we buy our supply of nuts had used cardboard boxes to create partitions for people to stand in - usually we’d be all huddled together vying for an attendant’s attention while dipping into free samples placed on the counter. Now the attendants stood behind a thick screen of transparent plastic that had slits for you to pay and collect your purchases through. It’s a popular stall and people lined on either side of it. With the mandated 1.5m distance, it didn’t take many people for the queues to stretch far. While the arrangement was vastly space-inefficient, it wasn’t any less time-efficient than normal days. And alas, no free samples.

Saturday market in the time of a pandemic

10:00 We seem to have a love-hate relationship with flights these days. This repatriation flight from Malaysia to the Netherlands is getting flak for running too full. Others are using rather creative means to recreate the feel of being on a plane.

09:00 Since all deaths in the Netherlands have to be registered with the local municipalities, over time it’s becoming possible to get a sense of the real toll of Coronavirus. The current estimate is that it might be as high as two times the count officially attributed to Coronavirus. Comparisons to hongerwinter are being made already.

April 11, 2020

Quarantine Diaries, Day 26

(Posted 12 Apr 2020, 23:02)

21:00 We finished watching the 4 episode mini-series Unorthodox on Netflix. It offered us an intimate look into the life of the Satmar Hassidic community in New York City. It’s brilliantly made and features several excellent performances. Though watching this in the time of a pandemic was a little anxiety inducing.

My anxiety levels ranged from low during:

• scenes of busy cafés
• the scene featuring a small classroom at a conservatorium where the students crowded together practiced 2nd movement of Dvořák’s E-major Serenade

to medium during:

• scenes of the wedding and festivals when multiple relatives come together in confined spaces

to high:

• when people kissed their fingers and touched the mezuzah before entering the house

18:00 Stepped out for a walk with the wife. I am realising that you can’t step out these days without overhearing the word ‘Corona’ at least once. A few days ago I had seen these posters from the municipality of Amsterdam imploring people to maintain 1.5m distance for the sake of their mother, father, aunt etc.

Distance saves lives

Posters on the left

• Do it for your aunt
• Keep your mother out of Intensive Care

Posters on the right

• 1.5 meter to save your father’s life
• Do it for yourself and your mother

Today these had been plastered over by posters advertising music festivals¹ beginning in July. Given the current stage of the pandemic in the Netherlands and the crowding and relatively loose hygiene at these festivals, the prospects of them going ahead seem overly optimistic. Premature? Immature?

Music festivals

13:30 With schools now closed for close to 3 weeks, these days of homeschooling and a vacation but not quite a vacation must be stressful for children. The children on our floor got together yesterday to color and draw and left their handiwork stuck to the glass partition next to the elevator:

Children’s drawings

Children’s drawings

The lone, blue page on the right is a printout of instructions for using the elevator during a pandemic. It was stuck there by someone a week or so ago.

How to use an elevator during a pandemic

12:50 Seen at grocery stores: A roll of toilet/kitchen paper with a cleaning spray (labeled “this is not a hand sanitizer!”) for people who want to give their shopping basket handles a wipedown before picking them up. Landed a couple of bottles of a locally brewed beer that appears on the shelves around Easter.

Borouwerij ’TIJ Paasij

April 10, 2020