April 2020 – Page 2 – Expat Wanderluster

In Covid 19

Day 39: Is it…Is it an end in sight?

April 24, 2020 No Comments

The streets are a-flutter with the news. May 11 is the end of lockdown and the start of a gentle “deconfinement” – literally “coming out of lockdown” period. Tuesday night all will be revealed by the President and the Prime Minister as to exactly what that means.

From the little snippets released to press it’s going to be compulsory masks on public transport, people still need to work from home as much as possible, children are allowed back at school unless their parents don’t want them to and some businesses will be allowed to re-open.

There’s also talk about not being able to travel, particularly if you are in a severely affected region like mine and want to travel or pass through a less severely affected region. Exactly what that looks like no one knows. It’s been nearly two months since I last saw my other half and I have no idea when we’re going to be able to see each other again.

No restaurants or cafes yet. Which in some ways is a good thing judging from my experience this evening. Takeaway stores have been allowed to remain open (somehow it seems their finger-smeared counters are immune to COVID). Most have shut in my village, but I jumped for joy when earlier this week I discovered one lone sushi/thai place was open. All week I looked forward to a little treat of sushi and dumplings (funny what you miss) for my Friday night.

Until that is, I went in.

I ordered, then noted the complete lack of any protective gear on the staff. Unlike the supermarkets where staff are dressed as surgeons and have now erected large plastic screens between the checkout staff and customers, these guys had zip. Nada. Not a hand sanitiser bottle in sight. No sans contact (paywave) either, I noted as I punched in my pin number, wondering just exactly how many virus-infested hands had completed this very act before me.

I, on the other hand, have spent the last couple of weeks doing COVID training sessions including how to put on, wear, and take off a mask correctly. This procedure has involved cleaning my hands three times each session with what appears to be some kind of hydrochloric acid-based hand sanitiser judging by the lack of skin on my hands. I’ve been explaining the virtues of the 2m rule, how many times a day the workplace is disinfected, the perils of gloves, and how it’s not a good idea to say Bonjour by bumping elbows.

But here, no posters, no scotch on the floor to mark one metre distances and, from the look of the table, no frequent disinfecting of the premises. Perhaps I’m just spoilt at work, I don’t know.

The mask-less guy smiled and thanked me as he stood within one metre of me to hand me my receipt. I got home and took more skin off my hands with a thorough soap-washing before settling in to eat, trying to touch as little as possible of the packaging directly with my hands.

Oh well, I can always drink disinfectant.

“What’s that? A vaccine doesn’t exist against a virus that can be killed with soap?”

In The Bucket List

The Trans-Mongolian

April 23, 2020 No Comments

After recovering from hot pot, I was pleased to finally meet my tour group the next night. These would be the people I would be spending the next three weeks in close quarters with. There were seven of us, all women, plus the russian tour guide, a lad of 28 on his first solo trip as a guide. Poor thing. Four australians, a welsh-canadian, an american and a new zealander. One of the australians had already opened a bottle of wine and was drinking from a tumbler during the pre-trip briefing.

I was a little nervous when the tour guide suggested we all go out to dinner at a local restaurant that does “really nice, authentic chinese cuisine.” Fortunately the only suspect-looking thing on the menu was a spiced duck head. Oh and some snake intestines. But praise to heaven there was chow mein. Noodle dishes galore. They were really good.

By this stage I was an expert with Siri and the Google translate microphone and could even scan the menu to get the english translation. The waiters think nothing of you pushing a phone in their face for them to speak into and Translate does a not-bad translation. You’d think I’d done it all my life instead of a mere two days.

The next morning it was time for the adventure. So excited. 24 hours in a train to Ulan Baatar, Mongolia. Four to a tiny cabin on the train. We carefully arranged all our snacks and games and got to know each other.

Ever the explorer, I walked the length of the train to see what my home for the next 24 hours was going to be like. Mostly the same carriages as the one we were in, with little seats in the 50cm wide corridor in case you felt like a sit-down as you stared out the window at desert, more desert, and just to finish it off, desert. The dining cart was something else though (see photo).

After a fine evening of mongolian beer, cards, and getting to know each other, we headed off to sleep. My first time on an overnight train. I can only describe it as a never-ending slow roll earthquake. But you get used to it.

However I still wasn’t used to the time zone difference and so found myself awake at 5am. No one else was awake. It seemed like a good idea to do a bit of morning yoga seeing as my muscles were still aching from the flight and now from being cramped in the train. Little did I know it would be the start of much fun train yoga, as well as yoga pretty much everywhere over the next few weeks.

I didn’t regret it. There I was doing sun salutations watching the sun rise over the Gobi desert in Mongolia on the Trans-Mongolian train. Reach for Bucket List notebook. Place tick.

In Cultural Cock-Ups

Stick with Toilets

April 23, 2020 No Comments

The French are very precise.

What is it about toilets? You’ll see how important they became for me after my Bucket List trip around the world, particularly in underdeveloped countries.

Now here I was at my french class and an englishman had just joined the class. He was struggling a bit to find the french translation for “loo.” The french teachers were baffled too. Try as they might, they just didn’t know what he was talking about.

The french word for toilet is “les toilettes”. Yes, plural. Singular, it means sort of the equivalent of you are off to powder your nose. Important to use the plural form if you are intending to describe your, well, loo trip. Said in french, it’s much prettier than in english.

I came in halfway through the conversation. The english guy explained to me that he was trying to explain the slang “loo” as opposed to toilet which was considered too correct in english, along with lavatory which is just a bit too posh.

Turns out there isn’t a french translation for loo. Or dunny, bog, porcelain truck, lavatory. This is one occasion where the English outdo the French in the number of words available to describe the same thing. There are approximately two words in french to describe a toilet.

I know this because I proudly exclaimed “Oh yes, there is a translation, les chiottes!”

Les chiottes, I found out, is the equivalent of “the shitter.”

The Parisienne head teacher just about fell off her chair. “Ah, that word is extremely vulgar.”

Stick with les toilettes. It’s safer.