Living where we do, we absolutely know much how fortunate we are to live in peace. There is mental space and physical safety to do the things we want, like write these little amount to nothing important blog entries.
Not everyone has this option these days. We receive daily reminders of this fact and it's downright heartbreaking. People are being killed for a man's out-sized sense of power, control, and entitlement. We wish peace for everyone.
And the best of luck to Peter Turnley. He is in the Ukraine right now. What he says about the refugees and the photographs he is making of them fleeing the war zone gives serious pause.
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The pandemic hit hard two years ago.
We were in Nice when in early March 2020 before a nation-wide confinement had been declared when we contracted the dreaded CV19 virus.
We were laid low for two weeks. Thoughts were strange. Food took on a new and "interesting" taste. We were weak and ached all over. We had a dry cough. We dearly hoped the virus would stay out of our lungs and knew if it didn't that we were to call the doctor as soon as we could.
It was truly a scary time. Not much was known about the virus and we'd gotten caught up in the first wave of it.
The train back from Menton was filled with coughing sick people from Italy where the first wave of Covid 19 had entered Europe. A few days later, sick and coughing Italians were at a table next to us in a small cafe one morning. Sick and coughing locals were all around us during a concert at Notre Dame du Port. We didn't stand a chance.
After recovering we learned that 80 percent of the people who contracted the new virus had effects similar to ours. It was the other 20 percent who got into trouble. A neighbor back in Paris contracted the virus and was in the hospital and rehabilitation for over four months. He survives, but he's not nearly what he used to be.
Feeling fortunate, we wonder if dragging ourselves out to the balcony to bask under the Mediterranean sun an hour and a half a day during our illness had a positive effect on our outcome. Though, in truth, our odds were 4 to 1 that things would be OK.
Due to the nation-wide lockdown we extended our stay another month. After having spent a total of 4 months on the cote d'Azur if felt strange flying back into Paris. People who did not live here were turned away. Large tour groups and many individuals were all sent back to flight re-booking desks and were blocked from passing immigration.
If there was anything that summed up the uncertainty of the time it was that our taxi driver was by his own admission Chinese. He refused to wear a mask, and he understood how the world was judging him.
Come January 2021 and things around France had opened enough that we could make the TGV trip back to Nice to spend the winter there for the third year in a row. It looked like the virus was being brought under control.
Except it wasn't under control at all and due to another set of restrictions we needed to extend our stay another month. We also received our first rounds of vaccine, there.
Toward the end of our 2021 winter stay my family blew up and I scrambled to get things re-aligned so my father could return to living a healthy, happy, stress-free life. To put balm to our wounds from family troubles we decided it was worth returning to Nice for a fourth time to just "chill."
This meant that during the 2 year Covid Crisis (which at this point seems nearly over, what with the virus becoming endemic, finally) we spent 11 months out of 24 down south. We were practically locals around Port Lympia and la place Garibaldi.
I realize it's not a bad way to spend a pandemic. Nice and the surrounding region is beautiful. No complaints there. Absolutely none at all. Fortune smiled.
OK. We might grouse in an increasingly French way over the details and some of the unevenness of restrictions as they were applied, and the idiocy we saw first hand (ie: protests against vaccinations and mask), but we are still alive.
Two people in our immediate and extended families died from Covid 19. Fortune frowned.
