It was just a year ago today

[lsanderson]

On March 6, 2020, I got on a plane in Bangkok for one of those long days that stretch across the dateline and the Pacific. We switched planes in Narita, and thought we had time to hit the lounge, but headed for the gate and that ate up the available time. We got asked twenty questions by a rather irritating official before we were allowed down the elevator to the gate. We had been traveling since the end of January through airports and border stations in Seoul, Bangkok, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia without hitting quite that level of questioning. They also only questioned me, and I'm not great at responding to COVID-19 questions. Let's just say that Bangkok was a model of decorum compared to Japan. We thought we were fleeing from close to the epicenter of the pandemic -- little did we know that we were flying into the heart of it instead.

The flight was nonstop from Tokyo to Minneapolis, but getting off the plane in Minneapolis was like time had warped somewhere over the Pacific. Signs warning about COVID-19 had vanished. Temperature checks had gone too. My traveling companion had to report for jury duty on the Monday after we arrived from S.E. Asia. After Someone picked us up at the airport, we wondered if we'd left the frying pan for the fire. It turns out, we had.

Comments

[chefxh]

Uff da!

[quadong]

I remember that in the first week of March 2020, we all knew COVID existed, but weren't doing anything much about it. Signs saying to wash your hands went up. In the second week, I decided that I could work from home and started doing that. (I think March 10 was my last day in-person.) In the third or fourth week, that became mandatory.

Korea

[lsanderson]

We changed planes at Seoul on January 29, 2020, and the airport was oddly quiet. I don't think they checked temperatures as we got off the plane there, but they did in Bangkok, as they would at airports and border stations across S.E. Asia near China. Vietnam had closed its borders before March 6th, as one of the big stories was from a group of Korean youngins stuck there in quarantine whining about Vietnamese food.

[pameladean]

I remember following your travel tweets and worrying about you out in the big bad contagious world. Oy.

P.

[lsanderson]

Who knew that a military dictatorship with a titular king next door to China would out-perform Herr Trump? Well, except for the face masks and hand sanitizer everywhere in Thailand along with temperature checks at airports and shopping centers.