Life in Covid-ravaged Spain: Spring 2021 update

Hey hey!

I hope you’re doing well, wherever you are.

It’s been a pretty quiet week here in Spain.

Usually, we’d have our typical Holy Week schedule of processions and more at this point, but all that’s been cancelled.

You know. The ravages of Covid-19, still a thing – even now, in Spring 2021.

But quiet doesn’t mean uneventful. There are some things happening behind the scenes.

Spoiler alert: it’s mostly stupid.

So grab your barf bags…

Here’s a general update on the goings-on in Spain.

Travel restrictions, unless you’re German

There’s been a lot of back and forth among governments and about the continuing travel restrictions in Spain.

Finally, we seem to have settled on “stay in your Communidad Autónoma” for Holy Week. Normally, a lot of people would travel back to their hometowns or go to the beach. Or just have fun in some other city.

But not this year. Locals are prohibited from leaving their Comunidad.

On the other hand, the government has made it clear that Germans are welcome to come and spend money. Nobody’s happy about this – except perhaps the Germans – but in any event, that’s how things are.

Angela Merkel’s government quickly moved to discourage international travel, so in the end not too many people are coming down. The tourism industry in Mallorca is underwhelmed by the arrivals.

But a lot of people are seriously questioning the Spanish government’s priorities – nobody’s too excited about the “Germans-first” policy.

Another issue that some find upsetting is street parties in Madrid and Barcelona in the evenings.

A lot of French and Italian tourists have been coming to Spain in recent weeks because here, things are actually open – at least partially.

I see it most nights here in Born, in the center of Barcelona. Bars are open for takeout, serving booze in coffee cups. I go down to get a beer or a negroni, and it’s quite a scene – at least compared to the general lockdown feel in the rest of the city.

Can’t have the New Roaring 20s without speakeasies serving illegal booze, amirite?

But every night, the police try to disperse the street party, and sometimes they’re successful. Sometimes they send the street sweepers down the main streets to hose things down, and that moves everyone for a bit. Sometimes they just walk a line of cops down the street to disperse the groups that form.

Generally, you get the idea that the cops are following orders that are completely improvised, and change multiple times a week. Oh well.

My favorite moment that I’ve seen was a few days ago.

A police car stopped next to a group of Italian kids, and the driver told them (in Spanish) to move along. The kids switched to speaking English, pretended not to understand, and just ignored the cop.

He gave up and drove off.

Anything to avoid having to use those 20 words of English he remembers from high school.

Next topic for the day…

Elections in Madrid and… the end of Pablo Iglesias?

My caveat for this section is that I think politicians are mostly useless human beings, and I don’t really care about their careers at all.

But the situation in Madrid is worth mentioning these days.

A couple of weeks ago, in Murcia, the Ciudadanos Party – unofficial slogan: “only God knows who votes for us” – and the PSOE organized a vote of no confidence (moción de censura in Spanish) which rapidly failed, as a couple of members of Ciudadanos jumped ship and joined the Partido Popular.

Are you bored yet?

If so, skip ahead to the next section.

Still here? I promise this is going somewhere…

Okay, so this all happened in Murcia, a region which, in general, nobody ever talks about.

Up in Madrid, though, Isabel Diaz Ayuso, the President of the Comunidad, declared she was dissolving her legislature and called a new election for May 4th. Ayuso is from the PP, and the PP basically always wins in Madrid.

Suddenly, Ciudadanos look like they’ve fucked up bad.

And then, Pablo Iglesias, everyone’s favorite pony-tailed leftist, announced he was leaving his role as Vice President in order to run in the Madrid election.

I don’t think he has much chance of winning: Madrid the city is pretty leftist, but many of the other cities and towns in the region are not left-leaning at all.

So it’s at least possible we’ll soon be seeing the end of the Ciudadanos party AND Pablo Iglesias.

Neither of which would bother me at all, honestly.

In other news, I can’t believe I just wasted half an hour of my life writing about Spanish politics.

Moving on…

Catalonia sucks hind tit, vaccine-wise

Does anyone still say “sucking hind tit”?

I hope so… because that’s exactly how you’d describe Catalonia’s vaccine rollout.

We were all hopeful about the vaccination campaign starting on 27 December of last year, and many – myself included – thought we’d be done with this whole thing by now.

Instead, most parts of Spain are involved in an elaborate circle-jerk of incompetence – worst of all, Catalonia, which is in LAST PLACE as far as vaccinating people over 80 goes.

In case you’re not followning Catalan politics, there are many more important issues up here than ending the pandemic.

For example: trolling the monarchy, rioting over the arrest of some awful musician, and deciding which independence party gets to ruin [sic] the place for the next several years.

And so we wait.

Personally, I’m just hoping to live long enough to be able to sit in a bar after 5pm, or – gasp! – go out to dinner.

We’ll see.

Finally…

Masks here, masks there, masks and more masks everywhere

I honestly don’t care that much about masks.

But this week the government decided that the mask mandate (which so far hasn’t prevented the second or third wave of Coronavirus… just sayin’) also extends to beaches and swimming pools, and other socially distanced outdoor activities.

Of course, many people believe that masks have some almost-magical ability to prevent spread in the open air.

I’m personally unconvinced.

But what I really don’t like is the constantly-changing and moronic nature of most of these laws. Wearing masks outdoors, even while alone, seems pretty arbitrary – almost like they’re just trying to give the police carte blanche to stop people for nearly any “offense”.

My personal opinion is: you can force me to wear a mask, but you can’t force me to believe it’s an effective policy. And the more you annoy people with stupid and ineffective laws, the more they’re going to get sick of it all and just do whatever they want.

Telling people they can’t do their jobs, can’t travel, can’t socialize, and can’t go anywhere without a piece of paper over their faces is kind of a lot at this point. Maybe they could just focus on fucking vaccinating people so that we can go back to living our lives.

But as always, that’s just my opinion.

What do you think?

Hit me up, right here in the comments.

Fed uppedly yours,

Mr Chorizo (AKA Mr Daniel).

P.S. One of my main takeaways from the past year is that the people who were screaming FASCIST! at every one of ol’ Trump’s tweets are actually fine with governments taking arbitrary draconian measures… as long as they’re “friendly” leftists governments. I’ve never had a high tolerance for hypocrites, so you can guess how I feel about that. Anyway, that’s a story for another day. Happy Easter!