Unhappily, Japan is terribly, terribly slow with its vaccine rollout. They currently have about 1/4 of the population vaccinated, and they’re still requiring foreign visitors to quarantine after arrival. For a long time I’ve been holding out hope of being able to visit this fall, but my hope is fading.
I am looking forward to resuming regular blood donations very soon.
Travel? Well, visiting my dad involved a flight, and it went OK. Next month I will be taking a motorcycle road trip, which - apart from restaurant meals - mostly involves not being around anybody. Looking forward to it.
I went to a Major League Baseball game last Saturday. It was awesome. Many other signs of normality are appearing, like daffodils in the spring – like, dining indoors.
With regards to international travel, I expect it will be…complicated. Here’s my long story:
We had a cruise booked last spring (Viking) that was, of course, cancelled. This year Viking put some new cruises on the calendar (prematurely, as it turns out). We booked the Mediterranean in July - cancelled. mediterranean in August - cancelled. So Viking retrenched and rolled out gradually, with single island nation cruises: a loop around Bermuda, a loop around Iceland. All went well. Then they put together Med itineraries based in Malta that seemed to satisfy all Covid protocols: Malta to Greece, Malta to Croatia & Montenegro. They scheduled a dozen or so such cruises for July and August, and moved 2 ships to the Mediterranean. They chartered a Lufthansa flight from Valletta to Newark, NJ for the benefit of their American guests.
We booked one of the Croatia cruises, departing July 24.
Then Malta threw a monkey wrench into the works, and decided that not only do they require that all visitors be vaccinated (which is fine) but that they don’t accept the little CDC cards as proof of vaccination (which is most definitely not fine). I’m sure Viking and the Maltese government are in negotiations at the moment, involving screaming and/or bribes.
I am back to doing my own grocery shopping, but have remained masked in all public indoor places even though I am fully vaccinated. I don’t plan to do indoor dining, etc. for a while yet. I am due to return to the office (where I have never set foot since starting in October) 3 days/week, and masks will not be required there for fully vaccinated people, but I am on the fence about it. That is, if HR doesn’t tell me that I need to quarantine because Tom Scud was exposed at work - he had to go to his annual work conference over the July 4th weekend. Shocking absolutely nobody, several thousand people traveled from all over the country for this conference, where at the last minute the decision was made not to require masks (although he wore one anyway), and now a bunch of attendees have tested positive. (His HR just sent around an email yesterday.) Honestly I can’t even keep track of the public health guidance anymore, so I’m curious what HR will say.
I have had a handful of outdoor small-group hangouts, and I suspect our backyard and the fire pit we acquired last year will continue to get some use in the coming months. More than anything, I miss international travel. We are contemplating a trip in the fall to somewhere with a high level of vaccination - maybe Curacao or somewhere else in the Caribbean? I wasn’t crazy about the idea of having to get tested multiple times, but maybe it’s worth it for the safety factor, and I’m getting pretty stir-crazy. Hopefully the trip to Michigan next month to see Tom Scud’s family will help, but yeah, it’s not the same thing at all. We need a break that doesn’t revolve around planning around the needs and wants of small children and that involves some modicum of new scenery.
I was aware of the Maltese regulation, but not about the non-acceptance of CDC cards. I will looking for news about this, because this may be the beginning of the US and EU accepting each other’s vaccination cards. Even though we are in Switzerland, Switzerland and EU are accepting each others cards, so I’m hoping that someday (sooner than later) we could go to the US and not have to get tested, quarantined, etc.
The Maltese government has announced that they will indeed accept CDC cards as proof of vaccination. So it looks like our cruise is ON. On the other hand, there’s a snafu with British passengers – they’re required to carry travel insurance and they can’t get insurance for trips that go contrary to a travel advisory (such as this one). So our cruise has gone, in the past week, from all Brits/no Americans to all Americans/no Brits.