azdak

The Austrian government closed all the shops except supermarkets as of Monday and has ordered everyone to stay indoors except for non-essential journeys (going to work, if your business is still open and you can't work from home, the doctor's, and for a walk as long as you keep 2 metres away from everyone who isn't a member of your household). So this has been my second day of lockdown and I find myself with a lot of time on my hands. We're extremely lucky in that we're a three-person household with a garden in a semi-rural area, so we have more opportunities for distraction than most, but I miss my children horribly, especially the one I didn't get to see before we went into isolation. We have arranged that one day this week I will cycle into Vienna and we will go for a walk together on opposite sides of the road. It's been too windy for that up till now but I might go this afternoon, if the rain holds off.

My eldest is a primary school teacher. Her school normally has 250 kids but only 15 are registered for daycare and only 10 actually showed up yesterday. The staff have been divided into teams of three, one of whom does admin and has no contact with the children at all. The teams operate like terrorist cells. Each team comes in only one day a week and has no contact with the other teams, so Bex is only at school on Mondays. Her boyfriend has been working from home for the last two weeks as he had been on a skiing trip to Northern Italy and his company put him in self-isolation when he got back. Bex says they had been on the verge of killing each other with both of them at home all day, but presumably they will find a modus operandi over time.

The local council has organised a hotline and volunteer drivers so that vulnerable people, or sick people, can call to get their groceries delivered (Wolfgang and I are both on the list of volunteers), and the local organic shop is offering free deliveries. The local eateries also offer free deliveries but I can't honestly say I fancy the idea of eating food prepared by someone whose coronavirus status I don't know, so we won't be taking them up on that offer.

So far the biggest really obvious change for us (as we both work from home most of the time) is that when you do venture out for a walk, people don't greet each other. Austrian culture is very big on greetings, so it's totally weird to walk past people in the village and have them try to avoid eye contact and not respond when you say "Grüß Gott". Otherwise, on Day Two, it's mostly a matter of lying on the sofa watching the news a lot, knowing that any day now the shit will hit the fan, but still not quite able to really believe it. I suppose this is what the Phoney War must have felt like.