The 2020's

Exactly one year minus a day ago I wrote a post on this blog called "The 2010's" that was sort of a high-level synopsis of the decade. It seems that all in all there were some pretty good times and the post ended with these words:

Let's hope the 2020's bring just as much [...] good.

Whoops! I guess I probably jinxed it for everybody. Sorry about that. Then again, things can only get better from here, right? (imagine having said that about, e.g. American Democracy around January 4th!). Yes, things can always get worse, but they might also get better. Everyone has a bad day or a bad month or a bad year (*cough* 2020 *cough*) and the 2020's could still turn out to be good. While The 2010's recounted a lot of highlights, let's not forget about that time in October 2016 that I planned to fly direct from Munich to Redmond but then some snowstorm (!!!) cancelled flights, I got sent to Frankfurt, sat there for several hours, got sent to Vancouver, sat there for even more hours, finally got on a plane down to Seattle and arrived some 28 hours after having left Munich and then went on about 3 hours sleep per day for an entire jet-lagged week of giving presentations and not being able to remember more than approx. 0.7 seconds into the past at any given time. The point is that despite that, the 2010's recovered. The 2020's can too! (plus it's a lot harder to have a flight cancelled and then get re-routed all over the world since you can't really take a flight in the first place. Score!)

Ms. Merkel said yesterday that the hard lockdown in Germany would probably have to last up to another 10 weeks. That brings us to the middle of March which is coincidentally exactly when Lockdown #1 started so many moons ago. If the thought of 10 more weeks of this bullshit doesn't fill you with happiness and excitement then we are one and the same. Helga had one of her 3 per week 45 minute Zoom sessions for "online learning" this morning. Heinrich wasn't too amused so did a lot of screaming during that, Helga couldn't hear the teacher and was subsequently muted and so couldn't say anything, and I couldn't get any work done. It was a lot of fun. In this gloomy scenario, however, I force myself to be reminded of the words of a great philosopher of the 2020's (unknown) who said: the two best things about working from home are that (1) you have a home; and (2) you have a job. Good point, Mr. or Ms. Philosopher of these modern times (however, kids might lead to cancellation of point [2] which will then eventually lead to cancellation of point [1]. I hope not though).

I was thinking today that maybe we should move to Augsburg. Why not, right? I had previously considered a change of scenery, perhaps to Zürich for example, but upon discovering it's basically the most expensive city in the world to live in, the shine sort of wore off a bit. But Augsburg? You mean the city that "[a]fter Neuss and Trier, [...] Germany's third oldest city, founded in 15 BC by the Romans as Augusta Vindelicorum, named after the Roman emperor Augustus" [thanks Wikipedia]? Hell ya. But then again, what would we do in Augsburg?

Urban Arrowing and then Disaster

You might as well just call us Copenhageners. We are now officially a cargo bike family. It is pretty rad. It was the heady days of Summer 2020 and though we were still right in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic we were doing our darndest to adapt to the New Normal and it was high time that we upgraded our family transportation options. Despite my long-standing proponent nature toward the virtues of public transit, powers beyond our control had obviously pushed that option further down the list of things one has any desire to participate in due to not wanting to die and/or spread disease. With two small children instead of just one we found ourselves landlocked so to speak and somewhat sequestered to a more-or-less 5 km radius surrounding our abode if we wanted all to participate in any kind of outing. One option would have been the ever-dependable automobile. I looked at prices for the quite handsome Porsche Panamera, however, and -- because if I'm going to buy a car that is the car I'm going to buy -- moved on to the next option on the list. And that option was a family cargo bike. Not just any cargo bike, of course. The Porsche Panamera of cargo bikes: the Urban Arrow Family.

Yes, it's a beautiful transportation machine. It's as good as it gets for a Copenhagener, IMO. And we were embracing the Dutch Life wholeheartedly. We dove in with both feet (or whatever you say). We went to the Isar, we headed towards the mountains, we were embracing life. And then, Heinrich took a giant bite out of the side of the bucket, and we came crashing back down to Earth.

Österreich und Corona

This past weekend the Pemulis family left Munich for the first time in 5 months. We drove deep into the alpine mountains of Salzburger Land in Austria where we had rented a cottage for a 4-night getaway. The cottage sat at approximately 1400 metres above sea level in a small town surrounding an alpine lake called the Zauchensee.

The trip got started as I made my first use of public transportation since March to head to the north of the city and pick up our rental car. As somehow seems to be rather common (and which you wouldn't expect in Europe -- let alone Munich) I was led to a Ford station wagon. It was pretty sweet with all the standard cool stuff you expect nowadays like rear camera, radar alerts, integrated navigation system, etc., but often ending up with a Ford when renting a car in Germany feels a little weird.

I successfully manoeuvred the shiny black estate car toward the south side of Munich and before heading home I had a quick stop to make at the local baby store where we had on the previous day purchased a very expensive child seat. The man (I should say boy actually) installed the seat in our car and I was ready to head home to start packing up the car. First, however, I experienced a very authentic Munich Moment when leaving the parking lot of Kinnings Baby: besides my rented Ford, there were 5 other cars in the parking lot. 3 Audis -- all station wagon A6s, and 2 Porsches -- a Panamera and a Cayenne. So clearly this was one of the "common" baby stores...

Over the next 6 or 7 hours (approximately) we packed up the car to get ready to go. Somehow this takes longer every single time we go anywhere. But finally, after a lot of stress and struggling, and tears and sweat, we were all loaded up and off we went! One nice breakthrough of this car trip (both out and back) is that Heinrich was happy in the car! He didn't cry at all and he slept a little in both directions. This is a huge development as with every single other car trip (including as recently as February when we were in Spain) he would scream at the top of his lungs for the duration of the ride. This was, as you might imagine, less than ideal. Spoiler Alert: while he learned to be happy in the car, he is further than ever from learning how to sleep.

We arrived at the cottage quite late in the day and of course we had an original plan of grocery shopping in the nearby town after arriving but upon arrival the grocery store was already closed. Since there was no food in the cottage, Helga and I headed down the hill to town to get a pizza (or 4) from the local pizzeria. Interesting that while in Germany there are strict regulations about mask-wearing, in Austria no one was wearing masks in the grocery store (which I went to the next morning) or in the restaurant. While of course here in Germany you don't wear a mask if you're sitting at your table (you have to eat after all), all of the employees are doing so at all times. Here it was as if Corona didn't exist. It was almost strange in its semblance of normality. Anyways, we paid for the pizza and headed the 10 km back up the hill to our cottage for a traditional Austrian dinner: take-out pizza.

I will spare the details of the night as it was the same as at home and repeated each of the four nights that we were there: Heinrich not really sleeping at all and screaming and yelling as loud as he could for a good portion of the night. Fun times. In other unfortunate news Helga had caught a cold (it did take 3 weeks of being at Kindergarten for it to happen though) and so she wasn't sleeping that great either -- but nowhere even close to in the same universe as the disaster that her younger brother represents during the nights.

One of the highlights of the area where we were staying was the high quality hiking and trail running. We went for a couple of family hikes

and both Joelle and I got to each do a couple of epic trail runs covering quite a few hundred metres of elevation gain.

On Sunday we took the chair lift up a few hundred metres to explore the mountain a little more. Another funny thing about the regulations here is this: as I mentioned previously there are no requirements for masks in stores or restaurants. However, for the open air chair lift, with only our family members on board, masks were required for everyone aged 6 and above. Weird.

But the trip and wearing the required masks was worth it because up high on the mountain it was really nice, we had some nice lunch (beer for mom and dad and ice cream for Helga), and there was a big Spielplatz.

All in all it was a nice short vacation and great to get out of the city for the first time in a very long time. We look forward to our next excursion to the mountains... coming soon!

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.