The QuaranTEENS

EIGHTH WEEK

This week ended with good news : the end of quarentine. We won’t be able to have the same life as before but we can slowly regain our freedom in hopes to achieve a new normal. Starting with, no more travel certificates. 

If people respect the barrier gestures, we should be able to reopen restaurants within a month. It would be a step in fixing the country’s economy. In the meantime I enjoy making various different salads which I find enjoyable.

I made masks with my father’s partner for my family.  Now I know how to use the sewing machine.

Monday, I went to see my best friend who was coming back from the countryside.  It did me a lot of good to see her again while respecting the distances.

Finally my boyfriend came home and we ordered sushi it was great.  I missed him a lot ! 

After several weeks of quarantine, it’s officially the end of lockdown. I was waiting for this for a long time. They’re still restrictions but we can finally go out without an authorization within 100km. Hopefully there will not be another phase of containment anytime soon. Right now, there is a big problem with masks. A lot of town halls has received and distributed “masks” which was not of good quality. But, at least, there giving those away for free. Some schools are opening for young people, but it’s not the same as before, they are very careful and they take a lot of security measures. We are slowly regaining our lives like they were before this whole quarantine thing started.

Finally the lockdown is over but that doesn’t mean the virus also, so we still need to be careful in order to protect ourselves but also those around us and that includes wearing a mask, washing our hands frequently and respect social distancing.

I’ve always been a home lover so I wasn’t bordered about staying home. I occupied myself by watching movies and series, reading, listening to and doing music, doing tiktok’s 🤣, my homework and I spent a lot of time on Twitter. Twitter is a great platform to express and also inform yourselves (when you follow appropriate media’s), I let lots of things there. People made me laugh, but I was also chocked by others carelessness and stupidity. During the lockdown they were lots of debate to which I contributed. I watched a documentary on Netflix, called living undocumented, they filmed real undocumented families, their stories were very sad, some were deported, I recommend it to you guys because it shows the reality and we get to know how they feel, because they are confronted to injustice, discrimination and racism.
I think the most difficult thing during the confinement is to feel people around you meanwhile you want to be on our own, on some days I was like :

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I need to tell all of you next week Wednesday is my birthday and I will turn 18. So I started warming up to be pretty on that day and this is the result :

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Stay safe homies 💕

After having been locked up for almost 2 months, we are finally allowed to go out.

It’s such a wonderful relief, an unindescribable feeling. Of course I went out on monday, and being able to walk down on the street freely is amazing. Being able to feel the presence of passers-by and see new faces was a special feeling that I haven’t been able to experience for a long time. However, In my case, I still have a weird feeling about what’s going on. The atmosphere is still heavy, half of the people are wearing masks and the shops are mostly closed. But let’s take a look at the bright side, we can hang out with our friends, spend time outside, we won’t have to stay home and wonder “What am I gonna do to pass the time ?”, because we already know what to do.

In my opinion, we will have to wait a long time before returning to our former everyday life. School is still over for us, and we are still going to spend a lot of time on Netflix and Fortnite.

I’ve become so used to confinement these past two months and now that the city has “reopened,” not much has changed for me. I didn’t rush out and see friends, I’m not eager to go shopping and I don’t miss the mall. I miss Five Guys and going out to eat and well, I guess I am finally sick of my own cooking.

I haven’t been posting a lot because honestly, after keeping after so many emails, I haven’t had the strength to write. This is also a student project but whatevs!

How did I spend my time in my “quar”?

I took out the sewing machine and made masks.

I lurked on my neighbor since that’s the only entertainment here. Why is she on the roof with a stranger during quarantine? We may never solve the mystery.

I camped out in my living room for a few days. I even put on “nature” sounds and put woodsy essential oils in my diffuser for the full sensory effect.

I cooked a lot of delicious food and FaceTimed my friends and family daily. Honestly, this doesn’t replace human contact but since I’ve been living abroad for over eight years, I’m used to seeing my family once a year.

Now that everything is open and Parisians are back to acting heedless or even reckless, I’m not changing my habits. I don’t go out very much and plan to keep it that way. To be honest, like many of you, I’m waiting for everything to get shut down once again since people are not following the rules and guidelines very strictly. How are you celebrating your “freedom”?

On this third week of Ramadan I was still trying to find something useful to do given that I was tired of Fortnite, Warzone and Naruto. At first I got very excited about cooking with my mums, it’s a very instructive way of spending your time I think. But actually, I needed to find another way of spending my time while eating my muffins, my carrot cake and my fondant au white chocolat. By looking at Netflix’s top 10 I found “Top Boy”, a show about drug traffic and gang wars in UK and more specifically in London suburbs. By watching that show I realized how lucky I was and how hard is street life, you can get knifed or get thrown acid on you just because you were trying to provide for your family and criminality is the only thing society has left for you. After finishing the first season I was disappointed to not find a second one, I then spent my free time listening to music coming out from that “world”, the biggest mouvement being « drill ». I recommend you the songs “let’s lurk” by 67 and “Heartache” by jaykae.

Ismael CK

Hi everyone !! Since Monday, confinement has ended (for how long?) And many French people have returned to work. Personally I saw my girlfriend and my best friends again: it was really great to find them !! But very honestly I will always be careful and stay as much as possible at home, although the restrictions have ended, you must always be vigilant and avoid going out unnecessarily. I try to continue to be productive at home by working my lessons (I try) and I continue to play sports. It’s the first time I’ve been out and I’ve found it pretty good that people (at least around my neighborhood) respect the distance and pay attention to others. I hope that the end of this health crisis is approaching so that we can try to return to a normal life … With that, see you next week! (couldn’t find a meme for this post :(.. )

I recently heard that, after the “déconfinement”, a large part of the population ran towards two things: Zara and MacDonalds. I mean, seriously?

I crossed groups of dozens of people to meet this Monday in open spaces, I understand that people are in a hurry to meet again after two long months, but I am afraid that the quarantine was not enough to do that. So, we will know the results in a week (average time of onset of symptoms), I hope the curve goes down, but seeing so carefree, I’m really not sure that we will quickly end up with this virus issue.

The “déconfinement” did not impress me very much, most of the places are still closed, and even if I am able to go out more freely, I feel that the atmosphere is not really “deconfined”, but I think that it arranges things , as with the Cold War, it’s by being afraid that we can prepare for the worst, even if it’s surely not the best solution.

I believe that many people really do not understand what the virus is, there are many who worry too much, and others who don’t care at all.

The only way to overcome a virus, from what I understood from my biology lessons, is to catch it and wait for the immune system to get rid of it. Whether catching it or getting vaccinated, the process is the same. We mostly confine ourselves so that hospitals are not overcrowded, but it is not a matter of life and death for most people either. A flu does much more damage and we don’t even talk about it! Knowing this should be imperative for everyone on the planet.

But hey, I prefer that people are too afraid rather than they underestimate the virus too much. Finally, all of this was to say that the population is not interested enough in the current situation and just suffers the consequences.

Well, we’ll see the evolution of the pandemic in the coming weeks, we will see in my next post if I got it right or if I was too pessimistic.

This week is the first week of end of the lockdown. Actually that’s sound cool and I’m pretty happy about the situation because I fed up with the containment. Today was the first day where I returned to Paris for the beginning of the containment. And it was the first time I go out except in the garden of the hotel where I live these days. But I was surprised about the number of people out whitout any masks or something to protect themselves on the one hand and the others on the other hand. I think that’s not reasonable at all. It’s not because the containment is finished that the virus doesn’t exist anymore.

You will probably find it stupid but when I came back from Paris, I directly washed myself because I was afraid of non-respectful people. If they wanna be contaminated they can but without contaminate me lmao.

Otherwise, it’s been a long time since I sa was the hairdresser. But I decided to let my hair continuing pushing because finally I like this style with longer hair 🤷‍♂️

Since Monday we’ve been allowed to go out without any attestation, and we can stay as long as we want outside… Knowing that we were allowed to go out at midnight on Monday, at about midnight and 1 minute I was already outside with friends. Since then, I’ve been trying to get out as much as possible while staying protected, because there are a lot of people.

I went also to the hairdresser today because my hair was very, very long. I had to get a ponytail. It’s not bad. It changes my face. In short, everything is fine, but we must not forget that we may start the containment again, and therefore always respect the barrier gestures: we must now learn to live with the virus. By the way, there were a lot of people at the hairdresser’s, and everyone respected the gestures, it was good.

I wanted to come back to Kim Jong’s story : I don’t know if you’ve been following the story of Kim Jong-un’s possible death, but in reality he didn’t die, we don’t know exactly what happened, but I heard some rumors that he may have faked his death to see the reaction of “the country’s elite”, and there may have been a crackdown? True or false, there are more and more questions about this country.

See you next week, I hope everything goes well at home.