10/3 2020 Bissee, Kiel Germany

Europe is long to drive through if you start in Italy and will end in Sweden, and nevertheless a small continent. We try to put borders to nations inside the continent and borders to regions inside the nations. Nothing helps with Covid19, please, listen: no border will be of any interest for the virus! Mostly like the Randomware.

We had an affair with Randomware this autumn at thealps.com, and we were happy to have good hackers in our team. With little effort we could repair the damage. And no money were lost, almost.

What with this threat to all of our health and economy now – do we have hackers good enough to repair the damage? NO. The doctors are kneeling and the hospitals are overloaded. IN EUROPE! Experience from the places where the virus has spread most viciously should be the right way to handle this. Not closing the borders, it makes no sense. STAY AT HOME and don’t try to say that this is someone else’s problem.

Globalization.

I am thinking a lot these days, driving alone through the long motorways crossing Europe. The Autobahn is a perfect illustration of our way of life, in our civilized world. Thousands of trucks in a continuous line from Karlsruhe to Hamburg. Sometimes the right lane is staying still for hours, waiting for the traffic jam to lighten a bit. AND NO ONE IS COMPLAINING. This is a part of the rules. To stay in a line for hours waiting for your Whateveritis ware to be transported in the shortest and cheapest way from point A to point B.

Pollution, trafficked cuts in the landscape of nature and man, stress: a nearly surreal picture of our welfare and global need for speed in fixing ALL our needs.

But what if a virus, probably also the result of our need for speed – and growth without limits, in China exactly the same way as in Italy, suddenly makes it dangerous to get out and buy that necessary tool that for hours travelled between a factory in China and your net shop in Italy? Can you still go to the post office and pick it up without bearing a mask?

I left my hotel in Bottingen at 9.30 am and arrived in Bissee at 8.30 pm. Was not stopping for more than half an hour just to go to toilet and buy a sandwich. Disinfecting every inch of myself and my stuff afterwards.

Now I am lazy and the beautiful place I came to for this night on the road is called Antikhof Bissee. And exists since 1450. So is with the old continent. Nice 10 rooms that are extremely newly renovated (January this year with an excellent taste). My dear husband found it on booking.com and booked on the hotel’s own system, just to avoid the hotel to pay the fee of the most global tourist portal of all. The owner is married to a Danish woman and is the one doing the check in and the breakfast. In the beautiful restaurant with a big fire in the middle people laughing and dining this delicious German food that we all love.

No sign of virus inducted anti-socializing. Yet. What was this place like in the ancient 1500th century? What about war and plagues? And still it was surely pretty secluded compared to nowadays. Probably just a farm in the countryside.

I don’t know, and I go to sleep with my head heavy but still pretty calm in this strange world.