The first surprise of the traveler in a pandemic: you think that with the lack of customers the prices of air tickets will be on the ground.
Big mistake.
Capitalism is based on supply and demand.
And if there is no demand, the supply goes down and prices go up.
An Aristotle's first syllogism.
The
low cost thing
works in herd mode: we paddle planes, we give a worthless service, but we are cheap.
But if there are not those shovels of tourists, there are no
low cost
flights
.
Write it down the next time you are going to give birth to Ryanair.
The empty screens of Terminal 1 of the Barajas airport, on a Wednesday at 11 am.
A caricature of what was!
paco nadal
Then you have to overcome the depression of seeing an airport sadder than a funeral home.
Barajas T1 is a shadow of itself.
A single open bar, all the stores closed (who would have thought I'd miss Duty Free) and on the screens, five flights, five!
The furthest, to Istanbul.
Countless manual rinses with hydroalcoholic gel and several temperature measurements later, he managed to get on the plane.
Do you think it was empty?
That's because they swallow everything they tell on the news.
There will be few flights, but they are all full.
Side by side with your neighbor.
That is why I decide to use an FFP3 mask.
I confirm that you do not die with it from coronavirus.
From suffocation, probably yes.
God, it's like wearing a brick wall around your nose and mouth.
It was a two and a half hour flight and I held on, but if I have to cross an ocean like that, I almost prefer the coronavirus.
Next time I'll come with an FFP2.
In fact, it is the one that I see that cabin personnel carry, who spend the day on airplanes and as far as I know, it is not a group that falls like bedbugs due to the virus.
More singularities: if it was already boring to spend hours on a plane, now that they don't even give you water, it is to cut your wrists.
I never thought I was going to miss the plastic food (chicken or pasta?), Those bottles of Marques de Cáceres wine from carafón and that hot beer paid at the price of Chivas Regal Royal Salute but that tasted like glory at 30,000 feet.
There's nothing like losing silly things to appreciate how happy they made you.
Useful things may remain from this pandemic.
Like not having to plant two kisses on the face of a stranger.
Or that the evacuation of the planes continues as it is done now, by rows, quietly waiting in your seat for those in the front row to get up, pick up their suitcase and go down the aisle, instead of all of us getting up in droves , bothering each other lowering suitcases to wait half an hour standing, with the neighbour's armpit at the height of your nose, to unravel the mess.
I can attest that such a plane is evacuated first, but I bet it will last as long as this health crisis lasts.
There will always be a prisoner who wants to get out earlier and the call effect will lead everyone to rapture again.
Humans are like that.
By the way, no one asked me for the negative antigen test at the Rome airport.
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A shared post by Paco Nadal (@paconadal)
Sardinia was, what do you want me to tell you, sad too, like Barajas, gray without tourists.
An island where its main attraction is the beaches, in February it usually has a flat electrocardiogram.
If you add the pandemic, the closure of bars and restaurants at 6 p.m. and the curfew at 10 p.m. the result is the same nightlife as in Vatican City.
Of course, zero stress and queues.
What do you want to rent a car?
"There you have them all, choose the one you want." Accommodation? You can find a bed in the one you want (of the ones that are open, which are not all) at the time you want, on the beachfront and at bargain prices. I feel like the protagonist of the series
The Last Man on Earth
: I have all the resources at my disposal, but I get bored like an oyster.
On Monday, Sardinia went from orange to white (at the Covid-19 traffic light), the first Italian region to do so.
And restaurants and bars were reopened until 11 at night while the
coprifouco
(curfew) happened at 23:30.
Well… he's done!
Monday night in Cagliari felt like New Year's Eve.
All the young people of the capital huddled in terraces, restaurants and cocktail bars as if the world were ending tomorrow.
Striving to prepare the ground to return to the red light in a couple of weeks.
Although in this sense it is not possible to blame only Italians, here in Spain we know what happens when you "save" summer and then "save" Christmas.
I also go out to dinner that night as I remember that after the plague pandemic of the fourteenth century there were many orgies to celebrate the end of the curse.
Does anyone know if there is any of this already arranged for when we all get vaccinated?
If you want me to tell you the truth, the biggest problem with making the pandemic tourist is coming home.
Yours in Spain, I mean.
Getting a PCR done in your city is easy, because you control the places.
But doing it in a strange country, where you do not speak the language or the health system, is another story.
A Stephen King story, with a bit of bad luck.
I had to retrace almost 150 kilometers to get it done in the only place on the island that I found available.
In Italy they work more with
antigen
tests
and laboratories that do PCR (
tampone moleculare
, as they call it there) are scarce.
They gave me appointments in one, two weeks… If this happens in civilized Europe, I don't want to imagine what it will be like to become a
tampon
in the third world.
In Rome they require the PCR to get on the plane to Madrid, but with the mess involved in boarding 180 passengers, they only look at the date and the negative word.
No wonder the picaresque has already invented a business around the fake PCR.
A girl who only wears the antigen test (she states that she was only 48 hours in Italy and did not have time to do it) was denied access, but after insisting (not much, by the way), they told her: “Well, come up;
when he arrives in Spain he will be fined 300 euros ”.
But when we arrive in Spain no one asks us for any document, only the QR code of the Spain Travel Health application that every traveler who wants to enter Spain must fill out
online
before boarding.
So, if you have reached this line and want to know my answer to the initial question of this article, I will tell you: yes, you can go sightseeing with the one you are falling for.
But it is a mess of the ciborium.
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