Sick! A story of escape from "the glamorous Paris"

The birth of lockdown travel diaries

Chapter 1: The birth of lockdown travel diaries

BBQ night party. That was the name of our chat group that day. The name of our chat group changes every day depending on the activity scheduled for the night. We had a hot tub party, birthday bash, salsa night, Sunset lounge piña coladas session, and so on.

The surf resort was situated beside the Sunwave surf school. It has four apartments that vary in size and capacity. Opposite the apartments was a big wall, and in the middle, there was a big table and a swimming pool, a typical setting in Fuerteventura. On the right side of the big table, there was a big traditional charcoal barbeque grill. The people staying in the surf resort decided to organize a BBQ party night and invited every cool people they knew.

We sat around the big table beside the swimming pool, enjoying a barbeque feast: the two German guys voluntarily grilled meat, fake meat, and vegetables. There were big bowls of salad, bread of different sorts, and chips on a small table beside the barbeque grill where everybody could grab what they wanted before sitting at the table. The music was pumping; it was a good vibe. We had an excellent surfing session in the morning and now chilling over a feast. The people in surfing classes were there, plus other friends with people we met along the way in Corralejo, Fuerteventura.

I was surrounded by cool people. The pool was sparkling with lights coming from the sides of it. Everybody was in a happy mood; we were all on the same page, and we escaped the second lockdown. I was standing beside the pool and chatting with the two British guys when suddenly they turned off the music. I immediately asked what had happened. Somebody replied to me, "Holly is playing the Ukelele." I said, "Okay, that's very cool."

Before sharing how amazing Holly was in Ukelele and how soulful her voice was, I even volunteered to become her manager to get her a gig in Sunset Lounge; let me rewind the story.

A few months ago, I was in my apartment attending calls after calls, writing value propositions for different outsourced services for pharmaceutical companies, especially the famous clinical trial for COVID-19 vaccines. Those days when everybody across the globe was in lockdown to tame the spread of the coronavirus. Those dreading days when that deadly virus disrupted the entire value chain and the entire world. How did we end up in this situation? There were many speculations, a lot of blame, political agendas, conspiracy theories, and whatever humanity can complain about, so I would not even attempt to answer.

The lockdown was a depressing situation, probably not only for me but for the majority of humanity. The world stopped, with every human being frozen in their homes. I would wake up switching on my laptop on my dining table, end my day by switching off my laptop, and then open a bottle of wine to travel to the three-dimensional reality infused by the imaginary effects of alcohol. My imagination would travel to the depths and realms of my fantasies, slowly killing the suffering from boredom caused by staying still in a shoebox apartment in a vibrant posh neighborhood of Paris. From my alcohol hallucination comes the sleepiness; another day had passed.

I lived in one of the posh neighborhoods of Paris called Le Marais. The "gay-borhood," as we coin it, is a "bobo" (French slang for posh derived from the root word Boheme and Bourgeois). A fancy neighborhood full of bars and restaurants right after my doorstep. I lived just close to Hotel de Ville and a few steps from the famous Seine River. A few blocks from Louvre, Notre Dame and two minutes by walk from BHV, a high-end commercial center. It was the ideal place to taste, breathe and experience French life.

Paris is a beautiful place to live if you want to experience full gastronomic adventure, arts and music with different expositions, amazing events such as fashion weeks, museums for history lovers, and as cliché as it sounds, to pull off fashionable clothes and shoes. These Parisian lifestyle fantasies can only be fully experienced when everything is open; when everything is closed, it becomes a ghost town. The irony of the Parisian lifestyle, as lavish as it is perceived by many, is that from the root word lavish comes the word expensive.