OH it was definitely a nightmare over in SE Asia too. I'm an American expat who's been living overseas since 2009 and we'd seen the Swine flu and the Bird flu, other scares with temperature checks during travel, but Covid was a whole other ball game. People started forming Facebook groups like "Australians stuck in Thailand," that kind of thing. I hated the stress of trying to figure out what we were supposed to do. Several of my friends traveled back to the US and had to quarantine and buy ridiculous insurance upon returning to SE Asia.
Haunting. It seems surreal now. I was traveling from London to Scotland, then Scotland to Norway the weekend before everything shut down. The airports weren't empty yet, but less crowded and on the train I wondered if the early adapter was wearing a mask to protect me or her. When my kids were very small I used to have vivid nightmares that war came and I was still a US citizen then - they were Norwegian. When Covid came, I had one "child" in England and the other in Denmark. I was a Norwegian citizen. Sometimes reality it more surreal than fiction. Thank you for this reminder of all that I've already shoved to the back of my mind.
And here I thought I was the only one to have the wrong passport worry while my kid was young. I had this quiet terror that we would be separated during some global crisis—never thought the issue would be a pandemic, though.
Such a rich and atmospheric piece of writing, Elizabeth- vividly takes the reader back to that anxious time.
Thank you, Ann. It was hard to relive it, and I found my memory to be untrustworthy after having intentionally forgotten so much of that time.
OH it was definitely a nightmare over in SE Asia too. I'm an American expat who's been living overseas since 2009 and we'd seen the Swine flu and the Bird flu, other scares with temperature checks during travel, but Covid was a whole other ball game. People started forming Facebook groups like "Australians stuck in Thailand," that kind of thing. I hated the stress of trying to figure out what we were supposed to do. Several of my friends traveled back to the US and had to quarantine and buy ridiculous insurance upon returning to SE Asia.
Yes! The stress was awful. There was little to no official guidance, and the rules changed continuously.
Haunting. It seems surreal now. I was traveling from London to Scotland, then Scotland to Norway the weekend before everything shut down. The airports weren't empty yet, but less crowded and on the train I wondered if the early adapter was wearing a mask to protect me or her. When my kids were very small I used to have vivid nightmares that war came and I was still a US citizen then - they were Norwegian. When Covid came, I had one "child" in England and the other in Denmark. I was a Norwegian citizen. Sometimes reality it more surreal than fiction. Thank you for this reminder of all that I've already shoved to the back of my mind.
And here I thought I was the only one to have the wrong passport worry while my kid was young. I had this quiet terror that we would be separated during some global crisis—never thought the issue would be a pandemic, though.