Expat In Romania

Thursday - 2 April, 2020 Before writing this post I had to spend a bit of time making sense of the timeline in these diary entries. I only wrote on Tuesday what I wanted to write on Monday, and, instead of 31st in the post heading I wrote the 30th, and, because I published it after midnight, the post date reads April 1st.  It was like trying to untangle a set of earphones after stuffing them inside a drawer for a few months. But I think I managed; we are on the second of April in the year 2020, and although we are on the 18th day of the Coronavirus Diaries, I'm including day 17 in the title - for a bit of aesthetic value in the series' continuance. You know one thing that's really flipped on its head since this whole thing started? Weekends. It's still nice to sleep in a bit, that hasn't changed, but since you're not going to do much the weekends can be pretty dull while the weekdays, with work in sixth gear now that productivity has shot up, are the more ev...

Tuesday - March 30, 2020 The clocks changed this weekend. Guess what I did? I changed the clocks on the oven and the microwave. Is this schizophrenic behaviour? You bet. But we live in schizophrenic times. Normally a month would go by until I finally took the 30 seconds or so to change the clocks that do not auto-adjust along with the return to summer time, but guess what? I had nothing else to do! I've stopped caring for the past week. Not about life, but about the menace clouding our entire planet. I mean, whatever. We all die, we all die. Again, I haven't given up, but I guess what I'm saying is fatalism isn't the worst  state of mind under the circumstances. And, you know, I kinda like that we're all in it together. It's better to go out all at once than with an audience of people feeling sorry for you. Again, I'm not saying we're doomed and we're all going to die. Really I'm not, it's just my way of thinking about Mr. Covid Virusescu...

Nothing happened today

Thursday - March 26, 2020 This was the most bunker-like day so far. I haven't heard any news (okay a bit about Romania's Lombardy ) How the doctors were treated like absolute garbage by the hospital administration and the ministry. How None of this is surprising given attitudes, and people are just trying to cover their asses. If it wasn't about the Coronavirus it would just be another day in Romania. But I really don't know about anything else outside the walls of my home. I assume life goes on, I assume the corner store is still there, as are the surrounding buildings, the garages and the cars parked on sidewalks, the graffiti, and, hopefully, the people. For some reason I am imagining we are an extremely special case of obedient citizens who've been shut in for the past several days, but the reality is there are probably plenty of others like us. They see slivers of Cluj through their windows, all of us with our own little vista and that's about all we ha...

Wednesday - March 25, 2020 After yesterday's episode of doom and gloom, here we are once again with the new normal. It has been decreed that the elderly are, in fact, allowed to leave their homes but only for two hours a day between 11AM and 1PM, or, if they are actually employed/working. They do have to fill out a form -as we all do - and so far the situation's been more or less under control. The big story in Romania is obviously the unfolding drama at the Suceava Emergency Hospital where a significant number of the medical staff were infected with the Coronavirus. The other big story is that Romania is now near the 1,000 mark at 906 cases. It's a psychological threshold more than anything but here we are. I've tried to limit my media intake to memes these past couple days because, aside from these restrictive measures, I don't like seeing headlines like, "The Hospital of Horror" while I'm trying to eat dinner, or lunch, or even while ridding ...

Yesterday I wrote about 'the new normal' - wondered about it, rather. But it turns out that wasn't it and the new normal is something that is evolving and getting worse by the day. While yesterday's updated emergency measures, announced on Saturday, limited movement between the hours of 10 PM and 6 PM we are now, starting at midnight tonight, all quarantined. This means we have to stay indoors except for grocery shopping, urgent medical appointments, going to work, or exercise/walking the dog nearby (and alone). All of this, of course, provided you have filled out/printed a form containing your personal information with your intentions clearly stated. First of all, who the hell has personal printers anymore? The other aspect, which makes these measures sound particularly draconian, is the fact that people over 65 are forbidden from leaving home, period. Now, it sounds sensible to do the social distancing thing and to acknowledge that seniors are more at risk, but in w...

Monday - March 24, 2020 This is the first day I didn't open the death-o-meter as I usually do, staring, alongside countless others from the comfort of our homes, at the morbid numbers on the screen. Which is to say I have no idea how many cases were reported this morning in Romania, but there are, this evening, 576 cases of infection in the country and 7 deaths. The new emergency measures have come into force today and brought along a snowstorm of the kind we haven't seen since January. It is only the third time this winter (if we can still call it that) that it snowed a full day and night. So that took care of the #stayathome challenge, but not for me. I had to run a quick errand across town this evening and drove over wet slush on deserted streets. Given the weather it was not surprising to see few cars on the road, but it was more like 2 am on a weekday rather than a weekday evening. Add to that the patrolling police cars with their flashing lights and it was hard to fo...