The Covid-19 Biergarten Experience (TM)

In this brave new world we need to adapt or die (so to speak) and eventually life must go on. If you step back and think about it for more than two seconds it's really quite astonishing that this is "a thing" but it is and so we accept that there has to be a balance found between keeping people alive and the other very important thing of companies continuing to make money. And so there's a push from politicians / businesses against the push from public health experts about when and how much to open up economies and societies and whatever else and I have to admit that people also need to be able to do things that make them human like socialize so it's not all just greedy business owners. But, in doing these once-normal things, we can't just jump right back into how things were before (though unfortunately many will see the opening up of life as we knew it to mean exactly life as we knew it and put all of us in danger but that's another story I suppose). We have to adapt and to participate in things like, you know, living, we have to approach it quite differently. Restaurants can now open here in Germany but tables have to be some very large distance apart and everyone has to wear masks (except when they're eating of course), etc. And then there's the ever-so-important part of Bavarian social and family life: the Biergarten...

The Biergarten / "Beer Garden" is -- not joking -- like really important in Bayern. It's not the roped-off licensed area for over-19's at outdoor festivals like in North America. It is where you go on Sunday with your family and friends. A beer garden isn't really a beer garden without a playground for children and, unlike in a restaurant, you sit wherever there's room and it's not weird at all to share tables. You're supposed to. You have to. It is all very informal, very low-stress, and very relaxing. But not so much in the Covid-19 times...

To research this story, on a recent unfortunately rather blustery day -- a Sunday, in fact -- I visited a popular local Biergarten with both family and friends. The very first thing that you notice that is now different than before is that when I said above that the Biergarten is not what they often call the "beer garden" in North America, one of the many aspects making it not that kind of beer garden is its openness; there is almost never any kind of specific single entrance or exit and there are definitely not gates or barriers or something of the sort to clearly delineate and enforce what the confines of the Biergarten are and are not. Well, not anymore. The Biergarten was roped off with a single entry point and a single exit. Fine. But related to these people funnelling devices is a new requirement which makes sure that you do not forget that you are living in the time of Corona. There is a long table with stacks of paper forms and some pens. It looks very much like the registration area at a small running race where you can sign up the day of the race but you first have to fill out a form and then pay your entry fee. Here, however, you must write down the name, address, and phone number of your entire party as a form of analog contact tracing. This is the primitive version of what Apple and Google are trying to do with mobile phones and what China is probably doing by Satellite and Artificial Intelligence. The idea is that if anyone who was at the Biergarten on that day eventually gets Covid-19, then everyone who was also there will get a call saying you had better quarantine yourself and you had better get tested. Now I'm not 100% sure how this information gets back to the Biergarten people. Like I'm not sure if it's voluntary on the person who gets sick to remember they were there two weeks ago and to call the place up and say "hey I was there two Sundays ago -- can you call all those people?". I sure hope not because if I got sick with Coronavirus I think the last thing on my mind would be "hey I better call that Biergarten where I was a couple of weeks ago before they hook me up to this ventilator"...

On the way through the entryway you have to wear a mask. When you go up to buy your beer (only bottles except they'll give you a glass for Weißbier because drinking Weißbier out of the bottle would be unthinkable for a German, Corona or no Corona) you also have to wear a mask. When you are sitting at your table (tables are now all spaced nicely far apart) you do not need to wear your mask. When you arrive at a table there is a small laminated card saying that this table is safe to sit at because it has been disinfected. When you leave the Biergarten you must bring that card with you on the way out so that people know your former table is now contaminated. They will then sanitize the table and put a brand new card back on so that the cycle may repeat itself.

All in all the visit was pleasant. While we probably wouldn't have chosen by ourselves to let Helga go play in the Spielplatz, it may have been therapeutic to have that outside push by the anonymous parents of the child she really wanted to go play with and for whom playing in the playground was clearly no problem at all. And it was definitely therapeutic for Helga (as long as she doesn't get Corona as a result). She needed that freedom and social interaction and for a brief moment in time she almost looked like a kid enjoying life and living in simpler times. Perhaps we can look forward to one day experiencing more than just a moment.

Corona 5: Scheiße

"Corona Virus ist nicht schön!" Helga likes to say. She has been known to be correct about some or even many things, and in this particular situation, she is right again. The Corona-Krise is affecting many people in many different ways. We are (so far anyways) much better off than many people (and we are thankful for that) who have really been directly affected but it seems no one is immune from the secondary effects. Just last week the high tech offices of [LARGE MULTI-NATIONAL PEOPLE TRANSPORTATION CORPORATION MASQUERADING AS FRIENDLY PROGRESSIVE START-UP] here in Munich were hit pretty hard by said secondary effects when approximately half of the office was laid off. Our GWMD protagonist Pemulis was thankfully spared but things will certainly change -- and not necessarily for the better -- with these drastic and unfortunately quite unexpected Corona-Krise upheavals.

In other very related news, Germany has started to "gradually" reduce the social restrictions on society and as anyone with half a brain could have told you, the results are already frustratingly disappointing; from The Guardian: "Germany sees infections rise again after easing lockdown". Well duh. The problem is not necessarily with the letter of the law -- the estimated transmission rate had dropped to somewhere around 0.5 in the last weeks. Having a closed economy and keeping kids out of schools can in many cases be worse than the disease itself and a number that low warrants some changes to the blunt instrument of total lockdown. But as is almost always the case, there is what the law says, what can be and is enforced, and what people interpret as the repercussions, severity, and seriousness / necessity of laws and regulations. In this case, if you look outside in almost any city in Europe, one can very successfully apply the adage: give people an inch, and they will take a mile.

It seems that people's default understanding of rules are to the letter, rather than the spirit, of those laws. And unfortunately, the spirit of the law is generally what matters. Perhaps the regulation changes should have read something like "you may now gather in groups... if you absolutely have to". Without those last few words -- which are of course lacking -- people seem to generally take the rule as "you may now gather in groups... because there is no more danger of any kind whatsoever... why not have a BBQ? Have a big party because all the badness (TM) is over". It is nicht schön being the pessimist / realist here, but I'm fairly sure this is not some transient disruption to our lives that will end and then everything will go back to normal. Barring the fact that for many people their lives will never be the same again, for everyone we have to come to the realization that life might forever be different. It has to be.

As of yesterday all stores in Germany can open. Anyone inside the store -- customers and employees alike -- must wear a mask, but it's still kind of crazy. The transmission rate is estimated to have gone up past 1.0 again and that was really fast. Especially because you'd think that many sensible people are taking either a wait-and-see approach or at least are understanding the fact that while we can go out and do more things, it doesn't mean that we have to. I would like nothing more than a return to something resembling normality: being able to go to my office so that I could actually concentrate on work for more than 7 minutes at a time; going for a walk down the Maximilianstraße past Cartier, the State Opera, and the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten to get a really good coffee; buying a couple of groceries on the way home without worrying and spending 30 minutes wiping them down with antibacterial wipes once I get home.

The big difficulty for me, I think, is not being able to have a specific future to look forward to. There's always been a running race or a trip somewhere or a visit from a friend to point to in the near future and know that it's something that's coming and so the current pattern of getting up, working on something, figuring out dinner, cleaning up, and going to bed will at least be broken up for a little bit in a little bit of time. But it's hard to hold that hope right now because our future is anything but specific.