So now we’re nearly a year into life with the virus and the new normal has started to feel decidedly, er, normal!
The situation has been improving – which is good news.
Spain has kept schools and businesses open since the first lockdown – much to the disappointment of students who feel most hard done by! Where possible, students are encouraged to work from home, so where many students go to the library after school to do their homework, they now have to do that from their house, and many universities have distance learning programs which they are running. Extra curricular activities were stopped for a while, but they are starting up again.
The restrictions that were applied to big towns are also being lifted. So I believe now we could go to Llerena for a coffee now, but the cafe or restaurant isn’t allowed to play music to stop people shouting. We also have to wear a mask except for the point of food or drink consumption – which could get very messy!
The mini lockdowns will continue and appear to work well. I had wondered how sustainable it would be – having a small village under lockdown whereas in the next village people were roaming free! However, like everything else, we just get used to it
As I’ve mentioned before, the feeling here is that we are learning to live with the virus – I don’t think that Spain is particularly vaccine sceptic, but the message that the vaccine isn’t the key to the ‘old normal’ is very strong. For example, although all care homes residents have had both doses of the vaccine now, restrictions aren’t being lifted because of fears there will be variants which residents aren’t protected against. However, the situation in Spanish care homes at the height of the first wave was truly horrifying, so I imagine that a super-abundance of caution is being applied.
I won’t be surprised to learn that there are new recommendations regarding masks soon. Research is being done into the effectiveness of ‘double masking’ – wearing two masks. At the moment we just have to wear face covering without there being any quality specifications, but I think we’ll see that change.
I am guessing this will be another year without fiestas. Already the Easter parades have been cancelled -they were last year too – and towns have been told not to hold carnival events. The key to keeping the latest wave under control appears to be keeping people local and stopping mixing between towns – so I imagine that’s something we’ll see certainly through the spring fiestas.
We have to go to the vet for Pixie’s blood test and Horace’s hair cut soon, so it will be interesting to get a feel for how things have been in Zafra. We haven’t been there since before Christmas when we did our cheese shop.
I wonder what I will be writing this time next year – what will have changed and what will be the same. In particular, I wonder if mask wearing will have become a normal part of society. It gets very dusty here in the summer, and I’d often thought about wearing a mask when we were out for a walk in the morning on the cement road, as if a tractor goes by, a huge cloud of cement dust is raised. I wonder now it mask wearing will have become more normalized so even if we aren’t wearing them because of the virus, it becomes more normal to wear one because of pollution or dust – simply because the unusualness of mask-wearing (here, I know it is different in big cities) has been negated.
In other news, poor Sam is showing his age. I’m not sure how aware of things he is now. Hopefully the warmer weather will be good for him – but we’re just taking it day by day.