They say ¨There’s a light at the end of the Covid tunnel.¨ I say, maybe, but that tunnel is deceptively long, twisty, and full of scary clowns just waiting to leap out from the dark corners. After four days of lessened restrictions over Christmas led to Portugal experiencing the highest per capita case numbers in the world, our government here immediately responded with a stringent new lock-down. While we watched the U.S. mostly give up on restrictions and focus on vaccinations, we have been staying at home except for essential trips since early January. Restaurants could only offer take-away and delivery, schools all closed. We were not supposed to “gather” with anyone outside of our household. EU countries have not been able to vaccinate as quickly as the U.S. has.
The lock-down worked and Portugal has been the shining star in Europe for a few weeks now.
A very cautious and gradual reopening only began on March 15 with the youngest kids returning to school. We all celebrated on April 5 when restaurants could again offer food at tables — but only outdoors and with a maximum of four people per table. Small shops also reopened. Only starting on April 6 (after the Easter risk), were we finally allowed to go beyond the borders of our community (essentially like a county.) We could finally see friends that live in Porto and beyond. Baby steps. The plan has additional easing scheduled for every two weeks. However, when the reopening timetable was announced, it also included the threat that everything could and would come to a screeching halt if numbers got out of line again. An evil graph rules our freedoms. By municipality, if the cases per 100k exceed 120 and transmission rate exceeds 1.0 for two consecutive weeks, their freedoms are frozen. And not just that municipality, but as many as five others that border the high-risk area. We expect to hear today if the new freedoms scheduled for Monday (including indoor service at restaurants and more businesses and schools opening) will happen for everyone, for some, or not at all. The uncertainty makes planning anything challenging and has everyone on edge.
And yet we do plan and we get out as much as allowed. We have a couple different road trips within the country planned for the next few weeks. We are seeing friends again. We are thrilled to be traveling on the metro again. They announced today that everyone over 60 will be vaccinated by the last week of May or the first week of June. Once we are fully vaccinated, we vow to make up for the lost time!
Meanwhile, we have used our endless time at home to do projects around the house and study Português. We’ve also been able to take our daily walks. We built planters and planted some herbs and vegetables on our rooftop terrace. (Of course, everything may die when we start to travel again. Oh, well.) Now that we can leave home again, I need to dust off the camera which has been pretty idle for two months.
This is what happens when you are locked-down for too long. The condo HOA wouldn’t fix-up this ugly stairwell building we look at on our rooftop terrace, so we took matters into our own hands. We removed mold, patched, and painted it. Then we designed this canvas wrap and installed it. The left piece is a windbreak we put up to block the cool ocean breeze as needed. The canvas was less expensive than 3 gallons of paint so we plan to replace it with new designs every couple of years.
Finally got to ride the metro into Porto after 2 months of going nowhere and saw 2 of the newest street art installations.
