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.↩︎