Quarantine Diaries, Day 23
13:20 Our collective resolve to stay indoors is beginning to fray a little. Life is still very far from going back to normal but I certainly saw more people outside today than I did in the past few days. I half expected this on a perfect spring day like today. Sunny but neither too warm nor too cold. While the Government is dealing with the more blatant violations of the lockdown decree sternly, it isn’t policing everyone yet. If the infection counts start spiking after a week or two, I fear we might be in for France/Italy style draconian measures.
13:04 Noticed a poster at the grocery store announcing early opening hours (7:00 - 8:00 AM) for people over 70. It is now mandatory to carry a shopping basket from a stack at the store’s entrance inside. An employee in the vicinity of the stack watches discreetly and reminds you to pick one if you don’t. This is how they control the number of people allowed inside the store at a given time. No shopping baskets at the entrance, no more people allowed to enter.
Early shopping hours for ‘70 plussers’
12:00 The brighter side to all the air travel coming to a halt - ProRail, the organisation responsible for our railway network, was able to fast-track a maintenance project inside Schiphol tunnel1. A project that would’ve been spread over multiple days in 2020 (with one part stretching into 2021), was moved forward to start on Mar 31 and finish on Apr 6. Hope they got done!
Perennially busy under normal circumstances making it difficult to find time slots to replace rail tracks.↩︎
Quarantine Diaries, Day 22
20:00 Managed to stick to the food time table we made yesterday. Definitely eases a not so insignificant cognitive load during a working day.
15:00 Stepped out for a few minutes to catch fresh air. It was one of those rare days when it was warmer outside than inside our apartment building. Even after all these years of living here, the first day out without a thick jacket still catches me by surprise after every winter. I walked at a leisurely pace by the water. I was drawn to the same spot where I had recorded the SAIL 2015 video I posted yesterday. I stood there and imagined a floatilla of ghost ships.
Quiet waters, ghost ships
We had seen these pots full of tulips being placed by the water from our window. Today I saw them up close. It’s already too warm for tulips and they won’t last very long now. On a normal year we’d take a day trip over the weekend to the tulip fields. This year we’ll make do with these. With Keukenhof not opening this year and practically the whole world in the grip of a pandemic, the dutch flower industry is yet another one to suffer badly this year.
Tulips!
12:00 After years of working in offices with standing desks I find it difficult to work all day sitting down. Since we don’t have a standing desk at home, I am using the bedrooms’s sideboard with an upturned foot bucket with a pile of books on top as one. I do sit down occasionally and for that I have appropriated the footstool that came with IKEA’s Strandmon wing chair1. It’s lying by the floor-to-ceiling bedroom window and I get a plenty of daylight these days. While working from this improvised (impoverished?) setup by the window this noon, I heard the faint sound of an air-raid siren:
Turns out, it was perfectly normal. At noon on the first Monday of every month, Amsterdam tests its flood warning alarm systems. It’s one of those little details of life in Amsterdam that goes on as usual. And no, I have no idea about how they plan to alert us about a flood that’d arrive at the same time as the one earmarked for testing these sirens.
Quarantine Diaries, Day 21
21:00 Thinking about Cruise ships also reminded me of SAIL - a once-every-five year nautical gala that Amsterdam is due to host in August. Hundreds of boats and ships of all shapes, sizes, provenance and vintage descend onto Amsterdam’s waters and docks for five days. The atmosphere that week is celebratory with many parties, special events and firework shows1. Here is a video from five years ago to give you a sense of just how unique this event is:
(the distant song you hear was playing on one of the ships)
I have a sinking feeling (always a bad one to have when talking about ships) that SAIL 2020 might get called off this year. Perhaps they’ll merely postpone it to 2021 - just like the olympics.
20:00 A lot of mental fatigue of being home has been from deciding what to have for our next meal. Today we put down a weekly schedule of 3 meals a day + some extra choices on the side to give us a little bit of wiggle room. Let’s see if we stick to the timetable, roll the dice or end up making something completely different.
10:00 Come April and cruise ships start arriving in Amsterdam at a regular cadence. Given the deaths and misery caused by the pandemic this year, especially on the cruise ships, it’s no surprise that they haven’t come calling yet. There are also tens of smaller river cruises that you usually see docked on the way to the north entrance of Centraal Station. They’ve vanished from the landscape too. There’s no telling when either would be back. Given that the demographic that favours cruises is also the demographic that the coronavirus is most lethal to, it’s unlikely we’ll see any this year. I have mixed feelings about the current plight of this industry. My view used to be a lot harsher because of the high environmental cost of cruise ships. As I’ve come to realise that for a lot of people this is probably the only viable way to see the world (quite possibly for the last time), I’ve turned somewhat sympathetic. Cruise ships now remind me of the old man from Up who wants to go see the world and after the death of his wife jerry rigs his house with balloons so that he can go travel. Cruise ships are that house with balloons for a lot of people.
A cruise ship departs Amsterdam in Sep 2019
The only downside is that for those five days, the smell of burnt diesel in the air is palpable.↩︎
Quarantine Diaries, Day 20
20:00 Stepped out for a quick grocery run. Need to get a bigger fridge and stop treating the neighbourhood grocery store as our pantry. Amsterdam was eerily quiet. Felt more like 4:00 AM than 8:00 PM. I could hear bells tolling from at least two churches nearby. Felt significant. The sort of detail that is an important clue in an Agatha Christe murder mystery.
17:00 We are being encouraged to pay with contactless cards to slow down the spread of Coronavirus. The banks here even increased the PIN-free spending limit from €25 to €50. But grocery bills have a nasty habit of being just a shade above the PIN-free upper bound on your card. As a result, we’ve been using Apple Pay a whole lot more since it doesn’t seem to prompt for a PIN for any amount.
Pay with your contactless card
16:20 Meanwhile, spring continues its inexorable march.
Spring
16:15 Almost all digital advertising space near Centraal Station is now dedicated to announcements about the Coronavirus.
Corona PSA
16:00 While the bicycle racks outside Centraal Station are beginning to empty out, the ferries from Noord are running worryingly full. The municipality is pre-empting the temptation to be out tomorrow1 and has banned boating in the canals. People definitely lingered longer outside today while doing their best to maintain 1.5m distance.
Empty bicycle racks
Social distancing 101
11:00 A beautiful animation showing how the HIV virus enters a cell and hijacks its machinary to replicate. via.
Complex organic compounds interacting with each other is what most of what we call living and dying boils down to.
A sunny, 20ºC Sunday. The perfect sort of day to lure winter-worn Amsterdammers outdoors.↩︎
Quarantine Diaries, Day 19
22:00 While the worldwide shortage of PPE and ventilators has been well publicised, there is a growing shortage of drugs needed to run an ICU that’s beginning to catch media’s attention. The Dutch hospitals have now been temporarily allowed to use veterinary propofol on humans. If this is happening in one of the richest countries in the world with a decent public healthcare system, I shudder to think of the horrors that await the slightly less well-to-do parts of the world. The old adage of prevention being better than cure never sounded truer…
14:00 Generously applying a hand lotion twice a day to keep the skin from turning into parchment.
10:05 A cold, rainy, windy day. The kind of day you’d need to pay people to go out on. We’d need a few more of these for our nationwide “lockdown” to be successful. This Sunday is forecast to be sunny with a high of 20ºC. It’ll be hard to keep people indoors after the kind of mild but wet winter we’ve had this year.
Quarantine Diaries, Day 18
19:00 After close to 3 weeks of video conferencing I am getting sick of the constant lag, dropped frames and choppy audio. In person meetings will feel like a miracle after this for the non-laggy audio alone.
15:07 Saw this outside our GP’s clinic a few days ago:
No Entry
It’s yet another way in which the old ways of this world are being upended - you no longer simply visit your GP when you are sick. They now offer consultations over phone and video and are even working 7 days a week. A newsletter I got from their office even offered to make arrangements for doing groceries for members of their practice that were in a high risk category owing to age or comorbidities.
14:40 With no cricket being played these days, Cricinfo has been dusting off their archival content. Their “RetroLive” feature showcases old matches - including prematch preview, “live” ball by ball text commentary and post-match analysis. While broadcasting old matches works on television (and even there probably as a highlights package) I am not so sure about text commentary. They featured the 2011 World Cup final between India and Sri Lanka today. I tuned in for India’s innings out of sheer nostalgia and even had my pulse go up for a moment as Malinga dismissed Sehwag and Tendulkar. But then the reality of this being text commentary for a match from over 9 years ago sank in and I closed the browser’s tab.
ESPN Cricinfo Retrolive