I am currently residing in Seville in the sunny south of Spain working as an English teacher. This is a diary of my experience during the COVID19 outbreak.
Throughout the past few months the Coronavirus outbreak has spread from China world wide. The outbreak had seemed like a ‘far away problem’ initially. Tragic, but unlikely to affect me in anyway. That is until the first case was confirmed in Spain on 31st January 2020. The next thing I knew I was hearing all about a huge outbreak of the virus in northern Italy, at this point it seemed like it was only a matter of time before Spain was in the same boat.
Sure enough over the next week cases in Spain began skyrocketing, calculations roughly put us 1 week behind Italy in terms of the spread of the virus.
On the 9th March the Italian government announced that they would be placing the entire country under quarantine and strictly restricting movement unless for essential reasons, effectively committing economic suicide in order to best protect their population from the outbreak. Sure enough 5 days later the Spanish government followed suite, announcing that they would be fining anybody caught in breach of the quarantine 500 euros.
Up until this point in time I have been teaching in company English classes around Sevilla. As the situation deteriorated in Spain we began preparing for the eventuality that all employees would be working from home eventually so we made preparations to move our classes online.
At the moment my living situation is an interesting one. I currently live in a huge old traditional Andalucian house built aorund a central open plaza or a ‘plazuela’ as they are known here. The house is located on Calle Feria, right near the Alameda, the heart of Sevilla’s nightlife. With me live 9 others, mostly international students from Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Italy and the Netherlands.
This living situation poses both advantages and disadvantages. Because I am to be locked down with so many people it means that there will be plenty of people to keep me company. On the other hand however, it does also mean that if one of us gets infected by the virus it won’t take long for all of us to get ill as well.
Anyway here we go…
Sunday 15th March 2020 – Day 1 of the Lockdown
So the lockdown has officially begun! Last night my flatmate Lucy told me that she had been at a bar with her father nearby (unfortunately he had chosen the wrong weekend to visit his daughter here in Seville!) when the local police arrived and promptly kicked everybody out and sending them home.
I woke up at around 10am, usually at this point I would wake up, have some breakfast and go for a run. Unfortunately this wasn’t really an option. Instead of just going back to sleep I grabbed my laptop and decided to binge watch something on netflix for a few hours.
At around midday I went to the supermarket and was shocked to find a queue of people waiting outside my local supermarket all spread 1 meter apart. After waiting around 20 minutes to get inside I was relieved to find that most of the stock was still there. I bought some chorizo, cheese and bread to tide me over until the bigger supermarkets opened on Monday.
I returned home to find the rest of my flatmates having a barbecue on the rooftop, so I hung out up there for a bit ate my chorizo and cheese and a few beers.
The rest of the day was spent in my room listening to music and preparing my online classes for Monday.
Netflix Summary: Pain and Gain, 2 episodes of Narcos Mexico
Albums Listened to: Frank Ocean: Channel Orange, Pink Floyd: The Wall
2022 and all that 