It’s certainly been an unusual start to the decade. There’s been Brexit, the assassination of an Iranian general, the US presidential election campaign trail, continued strikes all over France, massive bushfires across Australia…
But if there’s one thing that everyone across the world will remember as the defining event of 2020, it would have to be the novel coronavirus, aka Covid-19.
This previously unseen virus has quickly spread from its first human victim in Wuhan City, China, to virtually every country in the world in the space of just a few months. I remember first hearing about it right at the beginning of January and being somewhat interested in the idea of a virus jumping species, and this new pathogen which our immune systems didn’t recognise yet. I don’t think anyone at that time could possibly envisage the chaos that this virus would unleash on us all over the next few weeks.
For us in France, it all happened very quickly. I know back in January and even early February, a few people were somewhat concerned about catching it, but that was about it. Life went on as it always did. We’d go to work, socialise in the evenings, perfectly normal and no expectations that anything would change. The first big event in Europe was that the Italian government announced a state of emergency in the north of the country, as the number of cases there surged. We spent a week in Chamonix, right on the Italian border, in February, and I was disappointed about it because I’d been hoping to go on a drive through the Mont-Blanc tunnel and see the Italian side a bit, but no longer had that opportunity.
Even as the Italian government shut down the whole country in early March, we still never thought that the same would happen in France. Josh and I were actually hanging out at a pub with some friends the night we found out that Italy was going into lockdown, and we were amazed by such extreme turns of events but we never even talked about the same happening to us.
On Thursday the 12th of March, French President, Emmanuel Macron, announced the closure of all primary, middle, and high schools, creches and universities from the following Monday “until further notice.” All of the language assistants celebrated and joked around on social media that night because we thought we were going to start holidays early. I went to school the following day to work and my supervising teacher was talking about it as if the closure was for a two week period only, which took me by surprise, because I hadn’t heard any such timeline mentioned, and the announcement sounded pretty indefinite to me.
That weekend, the prime minister announced that all cafes, restaurants, pubs, theatres and any other non-essential business would be closed until further notice from midnight Saturday. So much for us assistants thinking we’d just gotten out of the rest of the contract and could make the most of all our free time! Josh and I had been planning a trip to Cassis or the nearby islands for that Monday, and we went to the port to see if we could catch a ferry over, but they were now only running for island residents.
While we were at the port, we saw policemen riding around on bikes, telling people who were too close to each other to separate. So many people were out wearing gloves and masks and it was truly surreal. Just one week before that, we’d met up with someone at the port, and it had still been its usual busy atmosphere then. Now, it was, like, this ominous quiet and neither of us wanted to stay longer there than we had to. That was the last time we’ve been out together in five weeks, the last time we visited the port and the last time we walked around freely.
Ever since then, we are obliged to stay at home unless absolutely necessary, like having to go and get essential food shopping, or medicine from the pharmacy. If we go out, we have to take a note with our reason for being out (which has to be one of a small number of state-approved reasons), remain within a one-kilometer radius of our home, and only be out for an hour or less. Just before lock down, the situation here in France escalated so quickly from being the same as ever, to total quarantine, within the space of a weekend.
So far the government’s saying that the end of quarantine will be the 11th of May – making it 8 weeks total, and only 3 weeks to go. I’m quite looking forward to getting out and about, I must say. In my next post, I’m going to cover ways I’ve been managing to maintain my mental health despite the isolation.
Seven Months in Marseille 