Author: thestampsinmypassport

A professional serving the travel industry for 25 years. Expertise and knowledge in sales, customer care and knowledge of the world. Sharing my knowledge, travel stories and tales from around the world in an engaging way.

The Last Week of Normal

On By thestampsinmypassportIn Uncategorized3 Comments

In life we are reminded of historical events in many ways. Of In the song American Pie, Don McLean sings about “the day the music died” referring to the plane crash on February 3, 1959 that killed musicians Buddy Holly, Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens.

Perhaps your Facebook Memories are reminding you about what you were doing this week one year ago. I know mine have been reminding me each day. A week that was not normal by any imagination. As a travel professional that specializes in Europe my world was already turning upside down, but still not even knowing what would happen as we approached the events of the week of March 14 – 20, where the world as we know it changed.

On Friday March 6th, 2020, my parents and I ate dinner at Sea Hi restaurant, as March 8th would be its last day being opening. This was a long time coming as I am sure regular patrons know all too well, but an institution in the community for almost 60 years. But like a great musical that has to close, the curtain needed to come down on this restaurant.

Not surprisingly, it was very busy on this Friday night. The demographic was an older crowd and many of them were reminiscing about their times in the restaurant and their experiences. There were people taking photos. It really was the end of an era in the community.

It was a neighbourhood spot. My father would tell the story about being 17 years old and parking cars for the patrons on a Saturday night. It may have been almost 60 years old and it looked its age. When you walked in and saw the Budda in the entrance way there was something comfortable and familiar at Sea Hi. If you look over the counter at the front door I am sure the calendar was still from 1959 and so were the piles of papers and receipts piled up on the desk by the calculator.

Their takeout business was large and you could tell because the restaurant was almost always empty. But as soon as you sat down, you were greeted with a large plate of their fried noodles and that delicious plum sauce. I would have loved to know where they purchased their plum sauce from because it was so good you could drink it.

Everyone has a different menu item that they enjoyed as was a staple every visit or take out order. I always enjoyed the honey garlic spare ribs and their fried rice. It had to be rice on the bottom, with ribs on the side with a nice helping of sauce on top of the rice.

There is a symbiotic relationship with Jews and Chinese Food. Everyone has ‘their place’ and to be fair, our places have changed many times over the years. I remember my father closing the store on Christmas Eve and we wanted anxiously for him to come home with our large brown paper bags filled with our favourite dishes from not just Sea Hi, but other places we have eaten from over the years.

This dinner was enjoyable for the fact that it was our last meal as this restaurant that we knew was closing. I wonder how many of you out there were eating at a restaurant that week in our lives that, perhaps due to the pandemic is not there any more. If you had known then what you know now, where you would have eaten that last week before everything changed.

Now that restaurants and establishments are starting to reopen it will be interesting to see the landscape as it starts to unfold. Many places have not survived the last year and there will be new ones that open in their places. As someone who loves food and the restaurant experience, I am looking forward to when it is time to start discovering new places to create new experiences in this new world we are living in today.

What do you remember about that week in March of 2020?

From Zero to Covid

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I have been thinking about ways to share my Covid journey. I know that with this blog and by posting on social media I have chosen to share my experiences. I appreciate that not everyone feels the same way. It was evident when I posted about having Covid the messages I received about others having it. I had no idea. The most common question I received was, “you go nowhere and you see no one, how did you get it?”

That in and of itself is a hard question to answer. It would be easy if I contracted it from a family member or if I was in a work place that had an outbreak. But that was not the case. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Due to a close contact with someone back on December 23rd, I tested negative and spent 14 days in isolation, until January 6th. After that I went back to my once a week grocery shop, visit to get bagels and maybe one or two other places. That was it. Since the start of 2021 I have been out in a public place five times. That sounds crazy just writing that, but really, I went no where and saw no one.

Once I tested positive, the contact tracing tracing team calls and they want to know everything you did the 48 hours before your symptoms started. They want specific details to determine who you were in contact with and if they were in “close contact”. My contact tracing was very small since one of the two days I was at home in my condo.

It started off with nasal congestion. The last place I went was the grocery store to get the ingredients to make a chicken soup because I thought I was getting a cold. The same store that I have shopped at once a week for the last 12 months. I came home, put the soup on the stove and then came into my office to work on the computer. I heard something and looked into the kitchen to see the soup boiling over, I didn’t even smell it on the stove. By the time it was time to eat the soup, I couldn’t taste it. I remember saying to myself, “you have Covid”. By the end of night I had back pain, a headache like I never had before and many other symptoms.

They recommend you wait four days after symptoms start to get tested, which I waited and went for my test. I looked at the doctor after the test and asked him a couple of questions and I remember saying to him, “I know I have it, but of course I have to get tested”.

I came home from the test and was standing in my elevator lobby. The door opens, I was about to step in and there was a man inside. I looked up at him, pointed to the sign above his head and said, “You know masks are mandatory, right?” He looked at me, shrugged his shoulders, lifted his hands in the air, and the door closed. I waited for the next empty elevator and came upstairs and waited. Waited for the test results to report positive.

As I shared on Facebook I did have to spend two nights in the hospital. I am not going to talk about those experiences in this post and perhaps not for a while.

Something that is very confusing to those who have not experienced this personally and have heard things from others. If you have been tested, the paper you get at the testing centre states that if you test positive, you must isolate for 10 days. If you have no fever for more than 24 hours prior to the end of isolation, your symptoms have not gotten worse and no new symptoms start, you are considered clear. You even get a ‘report card’ from Public Health. You don’t get retested as you now have antibodies in your system and can test positive for a few months.

I was cleared of Covid as of February 11th, but the virus caused me to develop pneumonia as discovered when I had my CT Angiogram in the ER at the hospital. That is what I am recovering from now, alone with the lingering symptoms of Covid that have not yet returned. It is now week four of recovery and it is getting better. I went outside the building today for the first time since coming home from the hospital.

I know I have learned many things. Everyone experiences Covid differently. Everyone recovers differently. I am very grateful that even though a hospital visit was required, I got the meds I needed to be well enough to recover at home.

It has been a very long year. We are not there yet. I really appreciate you coming along this journey with me.

In continued good health,

The Countdown Begins

On By thestampsinmypassportIn Uncategorized2 Comments

Last week I was having a catch up with a friend. A friend that is a private person and who’s life isn’t publicly on display often on social media. I respect the fact that there are people that share more than others on social media. While discussing what has been going on during the pandemic and what we both have been up to he asked, “have you been writing”? The answer simply is no. No excuses, there certainly is a lot to write about, but at the same time, it is hard to write when every day feels like groundhog day.

I replied, “no, but I do want to start, I am going to start on February 1st.” To which the follow up question was, why February 1st, why not January 29th. I decided February 1st because in 27 days I will be 50. Might as well start off the month of my birth with a post.

Like everyone who has celebrated a birthday during the pandemic, it isn’t the way we intended the celebration to be. Many have actually said their pandemic birthday was very different and very special in its own way. I think that is very valid. We all know that zoom, facetime and any other virtual visit forum is a great way to be connected to people who you would otherwise not have at your birthday celebration. I am looking forward to hopefully having some of those connections as well as the face to face ones that will happen at a socially distanced appropriate length.

It is crazy actually, that I started a discussion with my financial advisor at a coffee shop in August 2017 to be exact. We were discussing a few things and he asked me my plans for the next five years. I specifically told him that I will need money for a trip in 2021 when I turn 50. He asked what kind of trip, my reply was, “a pretty big one”.

In July 2018, I had found the trip. It was a 14 day cruise from Australia to New Zealand with a pre-cruise stay in Sydney and a post-cruise stay in Auckland. It was for April 2021. The week before Heath passed away we talked about it and when we would put the deposit down on the trip. It is funny to think about it now, in this pandemic time of life. If we had moved forward with this trip, we wouldn’t be taking this trip as we had talked about regardless due to the Pandemic.

Life is about making plans. I have always been the kind of person that likes to have something to look forward it. There was something sane about working through the insanity of it all knowing there was a prize at the end. I used to say it would get me through the crazy winter travel period of I had a trip planned when black out was over and we were approved to travel.

Turning fifty is not any different than wanted to have something to look forward to. In spring 2018, a new destination had been decided with someone who couldn’t have been more perfect for this trip. Spending Passover and Easter 2021 in Israel. Experiencing the best of what our two religions had to offer in the most magical of places. We had two years to plan and two years to continue to save for this time in our lives. I even created a hashtag #Passion50.

These kind of trips need to be planned well in advance. Even more so when you are looking at a pilgrimage type of holiday that happens once a year, like Passover and Easter. If you weren’t aware before, global flights are available to book 331 days in advance. Which, if you do the math on this trip would have been April 2020. We all know what was happening in April 2020, and planning a trip to Israel was not one of them.

Last fall we looked at the calendar and the dates of the two holidays in 2022 are even more symbiotic than they are in 2021. It is too soon to tell what this looks like. I am hopeful for a time in in the spring or early summer when we can start to have a discuss about the future of this trip.

The Pandemic hasn’t stopped me from thinking about what is next. I understand so many things (like life) are on pause, but when it time to push play I am going make sure the volume is turned up loud!

Until next time,