Day 1

With two Pfizer vaccines in my system and a QR code in my app to proof it, I put on my face mask, got in a bus, a train, two airplanes, three airports, another bus, and a hotel lobby, to take the d*mn thing off again about 12 hours later in my hotel room in Ponta Delgada on the island of São Miguel. After 1.5 years of mostly self-isolation I was wondering how anxious I would feel in confined spaces surrounded by numerous travellers from all over the world, but all I experienced was a feeling that is best described by an image of cows being released back into the fields from their stables after winter. Yes, it was a hassle to carry around the face mask and wear it everywhere inside, yes the plastic gloves we had to wear to be allowed to even touch the breakfast buffet limited the span and friction (and thereby the capacity) of my hands, yes it bugged me a little that we had filled out health declaration forms that really nobody cared for in the end and with questions that were highly un-original by this time, and yes I missed Dutch efficiency when I spent almost one hour in a reasonably large crowd (with about a dozen stressed out group members openly expressing either fear of missing our connecting flight or self-reassurance that this would not happen) in quite a confined space in Lisbon airport where we had to show our QR code to one of five officers who positioned themselves in a way that allowed for the least efficient processing of this crowd, but it was a price I was glad to pay for not just a change of carpet (the best we could hope for for a long time), but also a change of country, landscape, and weather. Things that apparently don’t change when travelling after a full-blown pandemic were the automatically flushing toilets at Schiphol airport still deciding I am done when I could have sworn this not to be the case – even multiple times in one sitting - and the first night away being like a first pancake; a bit of a failure. But even that was fine by me.