Life in Trieste after Covid

There is a certain serenity that comes with getting over Covid, and getting on with life afterwards. Luckily my case was not dramatic. It sucked, yes, but I did not end up in the hospital. Now that it's all over, I realize that I had been operating with a baseline stress level that was through the roof, but I had no idea. 

Now that the guilt of maybe someday infecting someone else or inadvertently creating a Covid hotspot single-handedly is past, I can finally relax and get back to work on what is really important. I'm done being busy being busy. 

Now it's time to concentrate on doing the real work that brings more peace, more serenity, more joy, and less of the rest of it. 

No more fear, no more stress. Time to move on.  

Dear Reader I have Covid

 Yes, Covid has come to get me. I could feel the circle tightening around us for several weeks before it actually got here. While the first wave seemed far away, this time we were starting to know people who had it. Most claimed to be "asymptomatic" almost to the point of suggesting that getting Covid was not the big deal it was hyped up to be. 

Let me clear things up for you.  Covid is no fun, or at least not for me. 

For the first week of it, my husband and I were in denial. We were mostly in bed, incapacitated by intense body aches and a pounding head. "Take the tachnipirina and rest" was the advice we were given by our doctor, so that is what we did. My husband had a mild fever, but I had none, so there was not one part of me that suspected it was Covid. In fact, the sneaky thing about Covid is that it changes the rules as it goes along and depending on whose body it inhabits. In our case, my husband and I had completely different symptoms. While my Covid decided to invade my lungs during week two, my husband never even got a cough. While his colleauge (who was also diagnosed) had a high fever for several days but no other symptoms, there was only one day where I had anything even close to a fever. It was at such a low level that in the old days I would have gone to work.

After one full week of feeling like crap, our doctor ordered a test for us. The call came the next day and we were told we had an appointment in 30 minutes at the drive-thru testing site in the Park of San Giovanni. I was teaching online at the time and had to scramble to get someone else to cover my classes. Apparently when they call you, there is no negotiating. My husband took the call. 

During week two we kept our daughter home as well, even though there is no written protocol covering parents who are sick but not yet diagnosed. This was a personal decision. We had been sick too long for it to be an ordinary flu. In the end our doctors said we did the right thing. Our daughter has still not been tested and she continues to have no symptoms. 

Being stuck in the house has not been too dramatic, although our dog has definitely suffered from a lack of long walks. Our daughter has been the main dog walker since we have been home, so that can't be fun for her, either. 

People have been calling to offer help getting groceries, which we appreciate, although most of the people who have called have been more concerned with whether or not they should get tested because they were in contact with someone who had contact with someone who had contact with soeone who was maybe in contact with us. We just tell them to talk to their doctor about their concerns. 

If all goes well, we should get tested again sometime next week, but if we don't, apparently we are free twenty days from onset of symptoms. I'm not sure this will change anything. Trieste is going into lockdown again starting Monday, so we may be free just in time to enjoy more time at home. 

At any rate, this is our story. Stay safe, everyone!

Guest Post: Trieste Staycation

Today's post is the second in a series of guest posts that explore Trieste by the people who live here.  It was inspired by the lockdown period during the first wave of Covid-19 and the idea of the "Staycation" and looking at our city from a different perspective. 

The following post is by Susanne Seghayer.   

When I attended college, I studied literally every single day. In the best-case scenario, I had only one week to rest and charge my batteries. During that week I did not make exotic travels, I just tried to relax and explore as much as I could my hometown, Trieste. Staycation was my routine during my college days.

When I was a sophomore, during the last days of July, I was enjoying my staycation with my sister. We decided to have lunch at one of our favorite Japanese restaurants in town but when we were near it, we realized that it was not lunch time yet. I offered her to visit my favorite museum in Trieste, the Revoltella museum. It is the modern and contemporary art gallery of Trieste and one of the most prestigious museums in the city. I’ve visited this art gallery several times and I have many personal memories linked to this place. For instance, when I attended elementary school, I went to visit this museum with my class, and I started to love art thanks to those visits. I had a strong desire to return to this place again especially because I was finally able to appreciate contemporary and modern art, my favorite ones.

The museum is built in the house of an important figure in Trieste history, the baron Pasquale Revoltella. He was crucial in the economic growth of Trieste during the 19th century and was an art and science lover too. The museum is divided into two parts. In one part, you can explore the house of Revoltella and in the other the art gallery. The latter is developed into 3 floors in which there are mainly paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries but the most important and relevant works of art are from the 20th century. On the top floor you can find paintings and sculptures made by some of the most prestigious and talented contemporary Italian artists such as Pomodoro, Fontana, Casorati and Vedova. 

When I was in the museum with my sister it was like being miles away from home. We were totally captured by the beauty of the place and by the amazing works of art that were exposed. It was like entering in a pyramid where your perception of space and time are completely different from the rest of the world. Contemplating art gave me a sense of peace and the feeling that I was on a completely different planet.

On the top of the building there is a panoramic terrace where you can see the gulf of Trieste. During summer evenings they often organize happy hours and concerts where you can relax and elaborate all the beauty that you watched during the visit.

I think that the secret of a rewarding staycation is trying to see your town through the eyes of a tourist, of someone who visits your city for the first time. You need to look at things that you have seen for years with a new glance, trying to observe details that you usually miss and surprise yourself with the beauty that every city hides inside. Every town has angles and places that you usually don’t visit and discovering them gives you the feeling of exploring something new and exciting. From my experience we tend to visit more other cities than ours. I know people who are born and raised in Rome that have not visited important galleries and monuments in Rome such as the Saint Peter church! Monuments that people from distant parts of the world come to Rome to see.

Another trick for an exciting staycation is exploring your city with different friends and members of your family. Each of them has particular interests and passions and they will open your mind showing you the sights that they love and are interested in. For instance, if you have a friend who is fond of science, you can go with him to visit the Immaginario Scientifico in Grignano and take also a swim there. If you have a relative that loves art you can go with him to visit monuments, churches and palaces that you usually do not look at with attention and interest. In Trieste there are palaces of different architectural styles and visiting them with an expert of art is such an incredible experience. Try it to believe!

So this year, explore your city, spend time with your friends and family, take photos and make new memories in YOUR town! Enjoy!

Guest Post: Stumbling is Worth it in Trieste

Today's post is the first in a series of guest posts that explore Trieste by the people who live here.  It was inspired by the lockdown period during the first wave of Covid-19 and the idea of the "Staycation" and looking at our city from a different perspective. 

The following post is by Marino Michelazzi.   

I usually stumble. A few years ago, I was walking with my youngest daughter. We were talking, smiling. Suddenly I felt something hit my tibia. A moment later I was lying on the ground, in the middle of the street and a car was coming. My daughter was screaming: “Papà!!!”

 I felt ashamed and so, in spite of the pain, I quickly jumped up and stood on my feet again. “What happened?” she asked. I looked back over my shoulder. There was a simple block of concrete near the sidewalk. It had always been there, but I did not see it because I was looking up at the top of a building, as usual. 

My family says that sooner or later I am going to end up under a car and in the hospital if I am lucky. Maybe. In any case, I cannot get rid of my good/bad habit of looking up at the top of buildings and observing the architecture.

In Trieste I stumble a lot. Trieste is not a city with a lot of astonishing monuments or important public buildings, and it is not famous for mesmerizingly modern architecture. It has several beautiful buildings and a peculiar spirit, but it is not Rome, Venice, or Florence. Nevertheless, in Trieste, you can stumble with every step, because there is a lot to look at up there.  

 

Saba Says

Umberto Saba, our most famous Triestino poet, wrote “Trieste has a surly grace…” (“Trieste ha una scontrosa grazia…”). I recognize that surly grace wandering around Trieste (which is a city of distinct neighborhoods) just outside of downtown. There, you can find unexpected hidden jewels in the architecture.

 

First Stop

For example, let me take you down the boulevard we call Viale XX Settembre. At the third cross-street turn right. This is called via Timeus. It is a narrow street with a continuous flow of cars and two narrow sidewalks. Pedestrians do not walk here, they run towards their destinations. Nobody takes the time to look up, but I invite you to! Stop in front of the building at n.4. Don’t worry about the flow of people, look up and admire the beauty.

The ground floor is painted ochre-yellow and the three floors above are light yellow with fake grey columns. Above the doorway there is a bas-relief showing what I think is two lovers standing on a pile of wood, amid other figures. It looks like they are going to be burned alive. I can’t tell you why. It’s a Mystery.

The first floor has a balcony with an elegant railing. But the real surprise is that at every floor, on the sides of the windows there are two classical-style niches in the wall with statues in them: two young women holding flowers or jars.

Second Stop

Don’t fall behind, now! We’re not done!

Let’s return along Viale XX Settembre. When we reach via Rossetti turn left. After two hundred meters, we encounter the entrance of the park of via Giulia. It is not Central Park but, anyway, it is a peaceful place with high trees, where kids can play, and older people can rest on cozy benches. We must walk to the opposite side. Look up please. It is an ordinary building like all the buildings near it. There are five light yellow floors above the ochre-yellow ground-floor. I am guessing that no building in the neighborhood, or even Trieste, has the same type of balconies: on first floor there is a small balcony in the middle,  on the third floor there are two little balconies near the sides. The Second and fourth floors have long balconies that cover the entire length of the façade. If you observe this strange railing closely, you will notice the elaborate floral motif in Secession style (do you remember Klimt?).

Maybe this is the reason the other buildings seem like walls of stone, while this one seems to speak to the high trees of the park.

Third Stop

 Don’t linger please, we have just one more stop for today. Saba continues:

“(Trieste) If liked, it is like a boy, harsh and greedy, with blue eyes and hands too big to give a flower…. “

(“se piace, è come un ragazzaccio aspro e vorace, con gli occhi azzurri e mani troppo grandi per regalare un fiore”)

We have to work for that flower by walking to the neighborhood of Roiano. Let’s take via Boccaccio, a lonely street with a gentle slope at the beginning. At one point, it opens up to form a large square with one side completely open towards the railway station and, beyond, the sea. In front of us, at one corner of the square, we find what we are looking for. The building has two sides that form a 90-degree angle. The less visible side is the same as the other facades, which is not surprising as they were built in the same era.

The other side, however, gives us something never before seen in Trieste. There are no walls dividing inside and outside. The spaces between the supporting columns, the floor to the ceiling are wood-framed glass windows. All four floors of the façade are made of glass. Remember, it is not a modern building made of steel and glass. It was built over a century ago with cut stone and, perhaps, one of the first attempts with concrete, in Trieste.

If take a look inside the rooms they all seem like artists' studios.

Saving the Rest for Another Day

We are coming to the end of our walk. Now we understand why Saba closed his poem with this:

“…like a lover, with jealousy “ (“…come un amore con gelosia”) Trieste loves its inhabitants with a widespread beauty, but is sometimes reticent to show off the gems. I am sure that if we take another walk tomorrow, however, we will stumble upon other hidden treasures once again.    

 

Culture and Connecting Again

My plan to get the hell out of Racine, Wisconsin, came to fruition a year ahead of time when I got accepted to an exchange program while I was in High School. I spent my Senior year in Liège, Belgium attending a public school for girls and living with three different host families, spending roughly 3 months in each. This was in 1990 and living abroad back then was a completely different beast compared to now. There were no cell phones or email just yet so communicating with home was all about crackly phone calls, writing letters on onion-skin paper, and trips to the post office. I was limited to one collect call home per month because it cost a lot and the quality was terrible. I spent most days writing long and detailed letters about my life in Belgium to anyone whose address I had remembered to record in my address book. The mail arrived twice a day in Belgium, and my goal was to receive mail in both deliveries. I wrote about 10-12 detailed letters a day.

Besides the endorphin kick I got every time the mail came and there was something in it for me, letters helped me cope with homesickness, process my experience, and make sure life didn’t go on too much without me back home. Every time I met someone I liked, we exchanged addresses and wrote letters to each other. I told my pen pals things I couldn’t tell anyone else in a million years. Letters were the magic stuff of procrastination and not paying attention in class. I loved them.

Mix tapes were the sophisticated cousin of the hand-written letter, the soundtrack to our teenage years. My friend Peter, a prolific mix-tape maker, remembers hours in the basement recording them, trying to create “the perfect score.” Sometimes they took days or weeks to compile, one song at a time. The choice of tracks was painstaking and planned. There was no internet then so you had three choices for collecting music: records, including scratches and skips, other cassettes, or the radio. You could also punctuate them with your own recorded voice like a radio D.J. or a Henry Rollins spoken words album. They took time to make and getting one was special. You didn’t just listen to them, either, you learned them.

Nikolai was in Belgium that year, too. He lives in Strasbourg and I live in Trieste. We try to speak every few weeks even if we both prefer letters. The first part of the conversation is mechanical, the things we perceive we are supposed to talk about. Then comes the good stuff along with a sigh of relief. What books are you reading and what did you think of them? What are you writing? “I am working more on my letter writing,” he says. He still sends post cards, and long letters when he has something complicated to say. I call him, but I wish for letters.

For a while, blogging was a good alternative to letter writing. It helped me process my experiences and gave me a satisfying boost when I pushed “publish.” I could go back and manipulate or delete what I wanted, and there was no mental anguish like there was when waiting for someone to reply to a letter. But blogging triggered the voice of my inner imposter. Why are you writing? You’re wasting your time. Nobody cares about the crap you’re putting out there. You should be doing something that brings in some money! Loser!

I never expected that people would actually read anything I wrote, so when they did, I felt ashamed and inadequate, which made me write less. I worried what people would think of me.

The humble, heart-revealing letter has disappeared, I lamented on a regular basis, along with that special connection between writer and reader. Can friendships be as deep without them? Has the intimacy and vulnerability of writing down our feelings and sharing our deepest secrets with that special person who is lucky enough to be on the receiving end gotten lost in the abyss? These were the questions I had been pondering before February 2020 when life changed forever in my tiny village on the outskirts of Trieste. The country went into lock-down because of the arrival of the novel Corona virus.

We were not allowed to go to work, or even leave the house without meeting strict guidelines and bringing complicated signed declarations with us detailing where we were going and what we were doing when we should have been home not getting infected. After a few weeks, we were all working from home and distances that used to seem immense got tiny.

I loved teaching online. I started making regular contact with friends from Racine, Wisconsin I hadn’t spoken to in years and others who were in Belgium with me. We met on Zoom and WhatsApp and laughed like old times. They came into the virtual classroom with me as guest speakers. I was in the International throngs of online working and my oldest and dearest friends were right there with me. Our friendships, in turn, went deeper.  

We dispensed with small talk. We stopped asking each other what we did after college, where we work, who we’re married to and how many kids we have. We started asking the important questions. What are you reading? What do you think of what’s going on in the world? What is important to you? And we were talking to each other the way we used to write to each other. The heart of the hand-written letter was back.

We also started creating together. Culture was never as important as it became during that lockdown period and since. Like letters had saved me during my year abroad in high school, culture became my new survival tool: creating art, reading about it, watching plays online, writing. Culture and creativity keep us alive and connected. When you can’t leave your house, culture is what pulls you through. Tanja, my bestie from Racine, and I are doing a writing course together to unleash our inner artists. Laura, who was with me in Belgium and lives and teaches in New York state, comes into my Zoom classroom once a week and we teach and learn together. We also started writing a play about being exchange students. Could it be that it took a pandemic and a complete shock to the way we live and work and communicate to remember how to connect again from the heart and make it matter?  

Enjoy your Staycation!!

Here's an update on what's happening in Trieste. Things have been pretty quiet and almost (dare I say) normal for the last few weeks. We can go out freely, we have to take our masks with us in case we can't safely distance, and many stores, especially grocery stores, require them. Otherwise things are like before but different. There is less traffic but no one seems to mind.

Our habits have changed. We eat out less often than we did before the pandemic. We are not making any travel plans, either, which we normally would have hammered out months ago. Daughter Eva is the exception. She has had two weeks of camp so far, a day camp just over the border in Koper to learn how to play tennis, and this week she is at sleepaway camp in Tolmin, Slovenia. She is living the river life, rafting, kayaking, playing with bugs, taking pictures with an old-fashioned digital camera because she doesn't have a phone. It was a lot easier to get into these programs this year since we signed up before we even knew if they would open up the borders again (they did, yay!). 

Socially, we are confused. The neighbors we quarantined with no longer talk to us and we are not sure why. That felt strange at first but we are not that sorry for some reason. We still say hi when we water the plants.

We are no longer required to show any form of affection to anyone if we don't want to. With other people we truly miss we throw our arms around each other and say YOU ARE WORTH THE RISK! and I DO NOT HAVE A FEVER, I PROMISE. We listen for a moment, no cough. 

Friends from the past have come back, the office no longer seems to need us there so much, people kind of like classes on Zoom. Some of us have taken up new hobbies, lifestyles, diets, started cultivating a creative life. My conversations with people are deeper than they were before when we were too busy to feel anything.

Culture has saved me from despair. I have watched a million plays I couldn't see before. I have read everything I could get my hands on that was different from what I was reading before. I started drawing and writing again and appreciating other peoples' art where possible. 

What is important has not changed but my relationship to it has shifted. Connecting to other people and creating things have become more urgent.  I feel thankful for that. 

We make no plans. Anything can happen between now and then. We live for the present. We are staying home this summer. 

What Happened to My Early Retirement?

Week One was BLISS. Really. It was so amazing. I was like This is what it must feel like to be retired. I loved every second of it. The thought of ever having to leave my house again was far, far away. I felt like a bear and all I wanted to do was hibernate.

Week Two was a little tiny bit worrisome, but still BLISS. I felt guilty for being so happy. I tried to spend my time connecting with people I hadn't heard from in a while. It was friendship maintenance week. I was creative. I dug up old projects that were hiding under new projects (that I wasn't working on either) and I worked on them. I felt alive.

Week Three was like MY HOUSE IS A MESS. I CAN'T LIVE THIS WAY. I MUST CLEAN UNTIL MY HANDS BLEED. This was the week I fell into the Double Standard that people who work from home suffer from. If you are at home rather than in another physical space called "work," you are expected to do EVERYTHING in the house, that's just how it is. No one else will lift a finger. Everything that is not right at home becomes your fault, too. And the worst part is that since you feel so guilty for not being somewhere else, you take the blame for it ALL and do everything in your power to make things right again. It actually works for a couple of days but it's completely unsustainable.

Week Four was like HOLY SHIT IF EVERYTHING IS CLOSED WHERE IS ALL THIS WORK COMING FROM? Are these people going to pay me?!

Week Five was like MY HOUSE IS MESSY AGAIN AND I AM ALWAYS ON A DAMN VIDEO CONFERENCE.

Week Six was like I NEED A SUBSCRIPTION TO THE NEW YORK TIMES because they removed the paywall for the Corona Virus stuff but I WANT TO READ ABOUT SOMETHING, ANYTHING ELSE!!

Summary:

1) I am working more now than I did before, when I was actually leaving the house.
2) If it's in the house, it's MY problem now, that includes all the extra cooking and cleaning. Ugh.
3) Every time I try to expect the worst, something seemingly NOT BAD happens, like I get more work.
4) The Quiet I crave is difficult to put on the calendar, but it must be scheduled! 

My new goal for the weekend is to actually have a weekend.  Only one video conference scheduled. That is huge.

Take care! Stay safe!

When Enough People Want Something

The best explanation for the craziness that is this world-wide period of quarantine came from my friend Sara.

This is what she said:

"When enough people want the same thing... they make it happen!

Kids didn't want to go to school anymore. They were fed up.

Adults didn't want to go to work anymore. They wanted to simplify their lives. They were tired of all of those commitments and appointments.

Nature  just wanted to take a breath of fresh air."

So here we are.

Boredom is the new Uncertainty

We have lost count of how many days we have been at home. I suggest you do the same. You are not in prison so there's no reason to keep track of the days on the wall. You can check your calendar later. Just try to feel normal. Get up, get dressed, get those shoes laced up. You're not home sick, you're not on vacation. Treat the week days as weekdays and you will be fine... until the weekend comes and all of our good deeds and habits go to shit.

We don't feel the effects on Saturday or Sunday, mind you. Our problem is Monday. It used to be because we had to go to work or to school after a pleasant weekend. Now the problem is getting deprogrammed after 48-hours of non-stop Netflix and social media and all of the delicious decadence we do not allow ourselves during the week.

On Mondays, our brains don't remember how to function autonomously. My independant and usually interesting 9-year-old says: "There's NOTHING to DO!" and my own brain cries for the dopamine rush of the down-swipe refresh. Seriously, it takes an entire day to get over it.

Some may suggest taking ourselves off the during-the-week social media/T.V. diet, but we've tried that. It only makes us into zombies who sleepwalk through weekdays, too. It's not pretty. Taking away Netflix, etc. during the weekend just feels cruel, especially since we are not free to roam around anymore.

Instead of being a meanie on weekends (isn't 5 out of 7 enough??) I hope instead for a major internet outage that would force us to take up old-fashioned forms of entertainment: Hey! Let's work on that latchhook pillow for your room! Who's up for a million-piece puzzle? Monopoly anyone?

They say boredom is necessary for creativity, so I keep that in mind as the complaints start rolling in at breakfast and intersperse throughout the day. Sometime after lunch when the room is clean, the homework is done, and 30 minutes of book have been read, Little Sweetie asks for an Exacto knife and if she can have the cardboard box which, before the weekend, housed beer. What a relief as Boredom is replaced by Danger and a Vision for the Perfect House for (creepy) LOL dolls, a mom's signal that the weekend is finally over. 

Corona Virus and Crazy Information

Yesterday in my post, I forgot to add one of the most glaring Cognitive Biases out there when it comes to how people are reacting to the Corona Virus. In his book, Thinking Fast and Slow,  Daniel Kahnemann calls it W.Y.S.I.A.T.I. (What you See is All There Is).

We make decisions based on the information we have in front of us. Here is a nice, simple explanation for it.

Last night my husband gets a strange message from a friend of his that was forwarded from someone else forwarded from someone else forwarded from someone else who APPARENTLY is an Italian in RUSSIA. The dialogue goes something like this (roughly translated):

"I am Antonio from Italy and I live in Russia and here I am in Pharmacy (which is supposedly in Russia but is spelled PHARMACY on the sign) in Moscow and I am so surprised to see that Corona Virus has existed here for 19 years and there is vaccine for it since 18 years. HOW CAN IT BE THAT IN ITALIA so many people DIE when HERE IN RUSSIA they have cure??"

WHAAAAAAA?

So I say, are you friends with Russian Bots, honey? Because that is some wacked out crazy stuff you're getting there. Does Paolo (friend who sent it who normally sends dippy jokes on Whatsapp) think this is real? Is it really Paolo? Like, maybe you need to have a talk with him or completely eliminate him from your  life? 

This is the perfect example of when NOT to rely on the WYSIATI cognitive bias.
How many people are getting this junk and believing it?

Then, today on the front page of one of the many newspapers I obsessively click through to fill my cup up with morning angst there is a picture of blissfully ignorant spring-break-people having chicken fights on a beach in Florida surrounded by a half-moon of spectators joyfully taking in this entertaining sight in the midst of a global pandemic.

My first thought: Really? Chicken fights? They still do those? The most un-fun game in the world at the best of times... 

The photo is juxtaposed with people in full-on battle-the-virus gear in an ICU somewhere in a slide show (which means it was either the Washington Post or the New York Times) to highlight the stark contrast between the believers and the Corona Virus WHO? folks.

What would the conversation with the chicken fighters sound like?

Interviewer (crazy enough to be out instead of home like the Weather Channel people who report from the eye of a tornado): I see you are partying on the beach rather than taking the necessary precautions of social distancing in order to inhibit the spread of the Corona Virus. How do you explain your actions?

Possible Answers:

1. "I don't know anyone who has Corona Virus, so I'm ok."
2.  "We're all going to get it at some point, might as well get it over with while I'm young!"
3. "This may be the last time I can party for a LONG TIME and I want to support local drinking establishments."
4. "Corona Virus is a hoax"

Then there is the only CREDIBLE (but IMPROBABLE) answer...

5.  "I'm sorry but my pre-frontal cortex isn't quite developed enough for me to see the possible consequences of my actions. I'm a little weak when it comes to executive function. After all, I am a few years shy of 25, when I hope to reach full maturity!" 

What is the lesson here?

How about we take all of the extra time we have because we are staying home and getting our work done so much faster because we don't have to spend all day looking busy anymore and start thinking and reasoning again and making sure we have information from credible sources before we make up our minds about things?

Trust Science, people.

Life under Corona Virus Lockdown

I have been getting a lot of questions about what it is like to be in Italy right now because of the Corona Virus situation. As it spreads around the world, the questions have become more frequent. I am assuming this is because looking at our situation provides a glimpse into a possible future, like how the Hubble Telescope helps us understand the past. Daniel, my friend in Sao Paolo, also under lockdown, but for less time, calls me his "laboratory guinea pig" who shows him what he can look forward to in the next few weeks. He's not the only one with this idea.

Here in Trieste, we are now in almost complete lockdown. This means that we are not allowed to leave our houses or apartments, that is our default position. There are some exceptions to this rule:

1) Supermarket
2) Pharmacy
3) Newstand
4) Dog walking
5) Work, if absolutely necessary

In all cases, you must have a printed document with you which is downloadable online on the government website. As of this writing, this is the latest document. If you are walking your dog, you are expected to be very close to home, as in you could point to it if you were stopped by the police.

Which comes to my next point, you can be stopped and questioned by the police. They are giving out very large fines to people who are found not following the rules, which have been expanded just two days ago to prohibit outdoor sports and, get this, walking alone.

The question arises, then, just how can the virus spread if you are walking alone or out running on your own? The simple answer is that it's not about the activities in themselves, it's about how people interpret the regulations in creative ways so they can get out of the house. See, nobody likes being required to stay home. In English we say "You give an inch they take a mile." Supermarkets are now closed on Sundays because people were organizing meetings with friends there, even when they weren't shopping. For some reason, this was happening mostly on Sundays.

For more on why it's so hard to keep people on lockdown, this Ted talk gives us some interesting insights.  I also believe that another reason people try to get away with not following the rules has to do with cognitive bias. For example, the Optimism Bias  states that people are more likely to assume that bad things will happen to other people and therefore underestimate their own risks. We all like to think that we will be the exception to the rule. I certainly do not intend on getting Corona Virus, but that doesn't stop me from staying home and washing my hands and taking precautions against danger, however.

Another cognitive bias we are seeing in the U.S. news, for example, is the Confirmation Bias, which states that we tend to heed information that confirms what we already believe. If you buy into a source of information that has been telling you that the Corona Virus is fake and that it will get cleaned up in a few days, it will be very difficult for you to listen to other sources, even if they are credible and fact-based. This is why so many move ahead with their same routines even if they are being instructed to do differently.

If I can say something about my experience: it's not as bad as I thought it would be.

In Italy, the fact that so many of us have had to switch to working from home on short notice has brought out the best in people. It has forced us to acknowledge that there are other ways of doing things and that the "old way" is not always the best way. Those of us who teach have found that our students are more engaged, for example. Perhaps this is because they can sleep a little longer in the morning and we are using "their" tools to reach them. Other friends in jobs who never expected to be able to work from home are finding that performance indicators are off the charts for the same reasons. There is something about being able to work from home in your own way that is helping people work better. I think the idea of "putting your hours in" has been replaced with "getting the job done" in however much time it takes you. For some of us this means working late at night or early in the morning, and on weekends, but you don't hear people complaining about it. At least I haven't.

That being said, I have colleagues who are not adapting as well to this change. They seem to hope that things will go back to "normal" (the way it used to be) in April when this lockdown situation is supposed to expire, even though it is more likely that the situation will continue into summer. They will eventually come around, I suspect, but everyone has to take their time to process what is happening. It is not easy as none of us has ever experienced anything like this.

Other positive things about being on lockdown.

1) My house is clean. I don't know when the bug hit (it was not immediate), but I am a tornado of cleanliness and I am totally digging it!

2) More time with my new puppy. When we were getting her we were worried we wouldn't be able to handle the rigorous meal and walking schedule, but that all changed the day before we brought her home. I have the happiest puppy on earth!

3) More time with my daughter. We work together at the kitchen table. She has about 5 hours of homework to complete per day. She is in fourth grade and has to meet with her class and her teachers on Zoom for 45-minute sessions about three times a week. She would be happy to do this forever. Keeping track of her work and creating a schedule took a couple of weeks. On weekdays she has to get up at 7:30 and get dressed. At first it is hard to communicate to kids that it is a school day even if you are at home. There is no TV allowed during the week. TV and Netflix (and youtube) are reserved for the weekend. She is allowed two group chat sessions on Whatsapp with her girlfriends from her class (five of them total) on mom's phone per day: one after lunch and one in the evening for about 10-20 minutes each time. The moms agreed to keep it limited to those two sessions and the girls were happy that no chatting would go on without them. No one wants to exclude or be excluded.

4) I love my house and I am happy here. I organize my time so I can do everything I need to do and I don't waste time waiting for busses anymore (I don't have a car). This lack of freedom makes me feel more free.

5) We are saving a ton of money. I am making less money (I am freelance, so I don't have a regular salary coming in) but we are not eating out (which we used to do at least once a week) or doing any other kind of shopping. Since we are home more, when it's cold I make a fire in my wood-burning stove and that heats my house. I haven't used gas to heat the house in weeks.  I also stopped drinking the week before we went on lockdown, so that has saved us some cash as well. We cook more. I make bread sometimes. It's all good.

6) It's much easier to stay on my diet. We are not going out or having dinner at friends' houses so it's easier to stay on the straight and narrow.

There are lots of other reasons to be thankful about this situation as well. I will try to update as things come up if I think they can benefit someone else.

In the meantime, stay safe and wash those hands!