Banning hotel minibars, spraying bleach on beaches, dumping chicken manure on roads: Around the world in 80 madcap lockdown rules
Future historians are going to look back in shock and horror at many of the radical lockdown rules being enforced now, or the off-the-wall ones being planned for when tourism finally takes flight again.
There’s a hilarious meme doing the rounds on WhatsApp of Doc Brown warning Marty McFly, “Whatever you do, don’t go to the year 2020!” I’m sure we all wish we had our own Back to the Future DeLorean time machine now – instead of having to patiently wait it out until the curve is flattened.
The only thing getting many people through the lockdown is daydreaming of being able to take a well-deserved holiday when this nightmare is all over. But vacations are going to feel very strange in our new reality until a cure is finally discovered.
It had crossed my mind to revisit Peloponnese, but after a long walk on their sandy beaches, you won’t be able to quench your thirst at the hotel mini-bar – with Greece bizarrely wanting to ban them as part of new social distancing rules. Yet it’s tame in comparison to Ireland’s fears about their pubs not being able to reopen in 2021, which I discussed here recently.
And if that wasn’t enough to cause heart failure, you might first have to “pass tests” before your plane even touches down in Athens, with Greek Tourism Minister Harry Theoharis telling BBC Radio 4, “It is very likely that we will have some requirements before travelling.”
But, of course, it might be a much more comfortable – albeit much pricier – trip to Greece too, with the EU’s nonsensical idea to introduce in-flight social distancing with the middle seat left vacant, which I also wrote about here last week.
Those of us easily spooked who are thinking about more exotic locations might be better off steering clear of Indonesia, considering one senior politician there is now publicly boasting about having “haunted houses!” Fed up with people flaunting the lockdown rules, Sragen Regency region’s head Kusdinar Untung Yuni Sukowati proclaimed, “If there’s an empty and haunted house in the village, put people in there and lock them up.”
So far five culprits have been banged up in such spooky jails there, which might come back to haunt the Indonesian government itself, with libel actions and arguments about human rights being violated.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/487653-world-madcap-lockdown-rules/