Tsunami 7 & 8. Back to Normal

To continue the internet fiasco, I went again to the store where I contracted it. There, the assistant called Movistar, and after twenty minutes with the phone hanging on his ear, the person he finally spoke with assured him that someone would come out to see the best place to put the hook-up box. 

On March 3rd. 

In the meantime, they might be calling me to see if they come up with any other, temporary solutions for me.

The assistant told me not to accept anything else. Of course not. If I accept a slow access to internet, it won't be temporary, it will become permanent. I will be saving them work, so they wouldn't make good on their promise to set up a connection to the fiber optic cable. Vaffanculo, Movistar. 

Yesterday, on the news, they were interviewing people on the Canary Islands. Everyone is depressed because this year, there is no Carnival. Celebrations should have begun, already, in many places. Various small towns here, in Galicia, would have already had customs being played out these past weeks. Chirigotas in Cádiz would have been performing, and the enormous, colorful floats of Tenerife would have hit the streets this weekend. 

Of course, with all these preliminaries, tourists would have shown up since days ago. Everyone is lamenting that this year is another lost year for tourism and all the attendant industry. What were people expecting, with vaccination proceeding so slowly?

Last year, during the lockdown, there were commentaries going around, on how it couldn't return to life as always, afterward. We finally stopped and saw what were the important things in life, and we now knew and would remember. Life couldn't return to "normal" because what we knew as "normal" was far from that.

So, where are the lessons learned? One of the lessons was obviously that we had to diversify our most important industry. Tourism is bread for today, and hunger for tomorrow. We are seeing the hunger part right now. After construction went down the drain in the 2008 crisis, we simply shifted onto another industry that is very susceptible to outside influence. Now, the pandemic crisis should have taught us that tourism is fine, but we can't depend only on tourism to create jobs. We need to diversify, and teach unemployed workers new skills. We need to create an emphasis on different industries at the same time. A nation can't be so dependent on only one, to the detriment of others. 

But, no, there won't be any seeking of any new industries, merely a return to the massification of tourists in our cities and beaches, once more. Before the pandemic hit, we had started to become worried about the concentration of tourists in our cities, to the point where ordinary people couldn't live in the middle of Barcelona or Madrid, because the prices had been pushed too far up by hotels, tourist apartments, and the like. Stores that had served the neighborhoods had closed, or been pushed out by rising rents, and all the remaining neighbors had left, were souvenir shops. The pulsating life of the center of our cities is gone, now, with few remaining residents, no ordinary shops, and no visitors. 

Yet, now we lament the dearth of tourists. It seems we've forgotten the problems we had brought on ourselves earlier. Tourism is good, but it can't be the only employer in large areas. So, instead of crying because of the lack of visitors, how about looking for different ways of creating jobs?

Life continues.