MASKS We do have to wear masks in the street. But only if we can´t keep the 2 meters social distancing. I think the government wants us not to relax, now that things are improving in Spain regarding to the virus expansion. There are exceptions. From next monday restaurants will open indoors. It is compulsary to wear a mask in a closed space, as it is a restaurant. So, how are you going to eat and drink wearing a mask? This is one of the contradictory situations we find everyday as the restrictions are lightening. Inside a restaurant people are gonna be more close to each other than anywhere else, yet one of the exceptions will take place just there, in the restaurants. We need to restart the economy of bars and restaurants, that is very important in this city. On the other hand we need to keep on being very careful. We´ll be eating with the masks in our pockets. There´s another aspect of this that i´m not sure about. I talk about the “social control”, the mask wearers pushing other people to put them too. It´s not that i´ve seen this happening. But it will occur for sure. Does that mean, pushing people to fulfill their obligations, that they care? Or does that mean that they are afraid and, somehow, they´re spreading their fear? I think that people has been quite responsible so far, we only need to maintain that consciousness, and we need as well, I reckon, to start throwing away our fear

Imperialist and imperialistic Hello. I´d like to know if those two words mean the same and, if that´s the case, which one is mores used. Thank you

My Neighbour My neighbour is 73 years old. It´s easy to understand that he was a little nervous at the beginning of the pandemic. “We old people are going to die. They want to kill us”. He lives by himself, just like me. Before the crisis we had a shallow relationship. We would say only the usual polite words to each other when we met. Hello! How are you? And that was it. As I said, he was really upset during the first two weeks or so of confinement. Then he started working in the little garden we share with some other neighbours. He would take care of the flowers and he thought of growing tomatoes, so he planted some seeds. Every night at 20:00 we would lean out of the window and applause the health workers. We started having small chats together. Every day stuff, in those days every day stuff meant disease stuff, so we found some comfort together and with some other people living nearby. Later on we had a week more or less of very nice weather. We would go out and sit under the sun, and talk for a while. I noticed that he was more relaxed now. The same happened to many people. The first two weeks were horrible and after that we got used to it. I learned that my neigbhour likes to joke around and that he is a good singer. He still says that he´ll be dead next week. Maybe, having that in mind, he found the way to enjoy his last days on earth. I´m joking but what i just wrote is half true. We bought some cider together a couple of weeks ago. He invited me to drink a very strong Galician orujo. Always keeping the distance, off course. Now that we are allowed to go out we don´t see each other that much, but we still share food recipes and we are going to buy another box of cider pretty soon. Now I see him going happily for a stroll with his friends. In the darkest times of the pandemic, we rediscovered the human power to help each other, on an every day and simple basis. Just getting together through this.

Bookings 4 “Hotel prices in Bogotá dropped” Every booking.com user in the world receives messages of this kind. Lots of them. Booking is behind you, travels with you, makes sure that you spend your money on their recommended hotels, or even on the rest, the not recommended ones. “Review score”, a 6.7 mark for “Hostal Conchita”, a hostal that you really like as you watch the pictures, and is located just 200 metres from the city center, town hall or parque central. “Something is wrong” the booking backpacker thinks. So you start reading the comments or you just decide to sleep somewhere else at once, despite the promising pictures and the unbeatable location. Over the years i came to realize that other´s people comments on the net, somehow acquired a huge influence on our decissions. We look for comments to back up and reinforce our choices. We don´t have a look only on comments about hotels, we also read them when they are about restaurants, day trips, tourist guides and agencies, nightclubs, museums, taxi drivers, recepcionists, policemen and custom agents. We want to be safe. Whether the locals live safe in their own countries is something that normally won´t reach our travelling minds.

Bookings 3 Booking creeps through your screen when you are reading the news or cheking your e-mail. Booking does not respect your privacy, slips into your favourite porn pages. Booking stands over your personal details when you are buying a plane ticket. It covers that article you are just about to read online. It invades your searchings on “how to get there..”. Even before you choose a destination, Booking is already offering you some places to stay in that place. Booking is a web predator, a powerful entity that works really well, watching your online activities at every time. Booking pushes you to write comments, Booking asks whether are you going to travel to that particular place that interested you two years ago. Booking is constant, never gives up. It´s pretty obvious that they´re doing very well. I booked acommodation on Booking.com many times, but until recently I never knew how high (or low) is the share they get out of the reservations. Taking into account the millions of hotel bookings we used to make before the pandemic, just calculate how much money they´re making. If you don´t feel lazy about it.

Bookings 2 I slept in hotels awarded with a not very promising 6'5 that were a perfect acommodation for me, and i spent some nights in highly qualified stablishments that left me indifferent, like if i had been sleeping in the ether. Generally speaking, i find that my marks are always a bit higher than average. Maybe i´m not a demanding person, i normally sleep very well and i don´t check the bathroom corners looking for stains or dust. “We always leave comments on the webpage”. I´ve been talking with a travelling couple from Barcelona. They see it as contribution to the community. But, what about moaners and posh-pretending people? Should we pay attention to them? I understand a hotel basically as a decent place to sleep after a good day of travel or tourism. I normally don´t write comments (just in case). But, during last year´s trip i spent a few times more than a week staying in the same place and, at the time of leaving, i felt pushed to write something on Booking, out of gratitude, appreciation or simply because i ended up being friends with the staff at the hotel, and i thought they deserved some good advertising.

Bookings It´s not that we didn´t expect that, but none of us, usual bookers, knew exactly how big is the commission taken by the company Booking out of the reservations made on its webpage. They told me it´s about 15% of the fee. The question is, as experience says, that hotel rooms are cheaper when you book them directly with the hotel. But not always, sometimes they are more expensive. Booking wants to help you, booking insists and booking bothers you. The Booking webpage is a good way to kill time, read something in the bathroom or entertain yourself as you´re waiting for the bus or plane. Reading comments can be a good sociological experiment. That same hotel awarded with 9 points out of ten most of the times, and then if you read a little further you see a 3 points mark..and you wonder why is that. “The sheets had a bad smell and the night recepcionist was very rude” “Splendid cleanliness and very helpful staff” Both comments about the same hotel, yes Not so many years ago, you wouldn´t book a hotel in advance, even less during the low season, when you were travelling with your backpack. Nowadays, looking for acommodation, watching the pictures and reading the comments on your mobile phone is a compulsory step(and an enjoyable one) on those exciting days before you travel from one place to another

SURFERS I remember that thirty years ago we started to see a few people (generally blond and australian), holding surfing boards with their arms and hanging around one of the beaches in town. That was then something picturesque for us, we were not used to enter the sea for anything else than swim, refresh or fish. It was curious, something different. Those people looked burned by the sun, relaxed and friendly. Some years passed by and some locals began to practice surf as well; we noticed that, surprisingly enough, they became blond too. Still, it was fun. It was also good for the city that their beaches were being more and more appreciated in the world so more tourists would come and that would be a benefit for everybody. The number os surfers increased dramatically during the following years. Now it isn´t that funny anymore. Now, as the summer comes and the beaches get crowded it has become really difficult to find a little space to swim or relax among the herds of local and foreign surfers that have conquered the waters of that one beach. They have their own space reserved in the sea (the council wants to keep the tourists happy and surfing schools ara now a tourist attraction in the city). If you want to bath in the sea or play with your children you need to be very careful, not to invade the surfer´s republic´s domains and no to be hit in the head by one surfing board. Even in lockdown times the surfers have been the first people to conquer the sea again, leaving the rest of population standing on the shore and watching them with frustration. It´s like having a stroll on the highway. And i ask myself: do they care at all?