Three Kings Parade |
In this week's Camino a Ítaca, travel returns. But it's a return like no other...a dystopian world of conflicting messages that alarm and confuse the traveler, mostly for no reason. Click over to read the original in el HOY in Spanish or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)
It always catches me off guard no matter how many times I experience it. We had dropped through the thick yellowish smog covering Madrid and coasted into Barajas just after the New Year when I heard it once again. Amidst the flight attendant’s increasingly exasperated pleading with heedless Germans to please remain seated, there they were: Christmas carols. The heady mix of her frustrated pleas and the complete disregard of some of the Germans as they fell over each other with each bump, mixed with Mariah Carey telling me that all she wanted for Christmas was me, made the scene even more surreal. We had boarded a plane in 2022 in Dusseldorf and there in Madrid we had been thrown back in time to Christmas 2021. It was the holidays on repeat.
It’s actually one of the
things I truly admire about Spain. This ability to maintain its singularitywhile adapting and molding itself to our globalized world. Apart from a few
crazy loons who insist that Islam was the only imported religion from the
Middle East, the vast majority of the people here are able to synthesize Santa
with the Three Kings, just as easily as they accept whipped cream on their roscon de reyes or Frank Sinatra singing about White Christmases alongside the eerie soundingchildren singing about fish drinking in the river. But even if I do admire it,
it does take me by surprise every year.
And last year was like no
other. Traveling during the reign of omicron has been bizarre. I first sensed
it as we checked our luggage and saw the fear in the flight attendants’ eyes as
they nervously flicked through a photocopied bunch of sheets stating the
different restrictions that awaited each passenger at their final destination.
The usually routine question, “Where are you flying to?” never held so much
hidden meaning. The questioning continued. Do you need a test? Do you have a
COVID passport? Did you wash your hands after using the bathroom? I began to
envision an emergency team in full PPE gear awaiting us in Germany that would
put us through all kinds of tests, but once again, my imagination was
completely off the mark.
On arrival the only thing
we were met with was my brother-in-law telling us that we were lucky, in two
days’ time the Germans were going to enforce a quarantine for travelers coming
from Spain. No PPE emergency teams, no tests, just our luggage awaited us.
My holiday travels took me
across Germany and then I crossed into Poland and there protocols and routines
changed again. After landing, I was asked to show my QR code for my vaccination
passport, but they didn’t check it against any ID. As it was in Spanish, it
could have been an ad for Mercadona for all they knew.
And it’s precisely that, these constant
changes. All of these incongruities drive the distrusting to disbelieve,
to reject science and to not get vaccinated. This constant improvisation makes
me wish that when we landed another song was playing. A song that somehow fast
forwarded us ahead to when this pandemic was well behind us.