(Wednesday, 20 May 2020)
So, now we have it. Confirmation that we can re-open on 29th May… which is just 9 days away… 🤨
There are rules, of course. Keeping the 1m distance maintained, no communal items at breakfast (i.e. no buffet and no coffee machine/tea making facilities etc) and extra cleaning… a LOT of extra cleaning. 😬
It’s all a bit scary if I’m honest. It feels like one minute we are locked away safely in our little cocoon and the next, we are open and widely exposed. But I guess that’s isolation/institutionalism for you. (Is that even a word? If not, it should be!) We’ve been locked away from reality for such a long time now… 9 1/2 weeks so far (somebody really should have made a film about that, it would make a great title 😜)… and despite knowing it was coming, the end feels like it has come about so quickly!
As a result, we suddenly felt the need to sit down and have a breakfast board meeting to work out what we needed to do, how to do it and ultimately, rewrite the ‘to-do list’ to ensure we are ready and prepared for the incoming guests.
Needless to say, it involved going shopping. 😂 We needed some items to allow us to modify our current breakfast arrangement into one that meets the rules and keeps both the guests and us, as safe as possible. We also needed some new plants, courtesy of the bloody vine weevils!*
*Apparently they are not all vine weevils, some of them are maybug larvae.. thanks to intel provided yesterday 😂 I’ve checked and they are almost identical, except the maybugs have little legs at the front and vine weevils don’t – so I’m pretty sure we’ve had a few of each 😠 Hey ho, every day is a school day 😂
Board meeting, breakfast and shopping trip went surprisingly well and we now have what feels like a massive list of stuff to do and a very short time to do it in. 😬
We noticed on our way out to our shopping expedition that our neighbours have erected a Maibaum in their garden. It was such a cheery thing to see! Of course, this was one of the traditional events (apparently it dates back to the 16th Century!) that was cancelled this year as a result of the lockdown and it was such a shame. We can see the top of the Maibaum from our house and we missed seeing it there this year.
Traditionally, Austrian villages and towns put up a Maibaum or ‘May pole’ for the first day of May. It is very elaborately decorated and can vary from place to place. Here, the main trunk is stripped of bark and branches, leaving just the top 1m or so, where the branches also remain. This part is decorated with red and white ribbons and circles made from the foliage of the lower branches.
The raising of these things is a sight to behold.. all done manually with specific pitch fork type things, in varying lengths. I couldn’t hope to describe it properly so I’ll find a couple of pictures from previous years and include them for you to see for yourselves! The Baum itself is the tallest one that can be found and is usually in the region of 30m+ which has been cut fresh from the forest the morning of the event. There is a local tradition (certainly around these parts) that marauding teams from the neighbouring villages will try to ‘invade’ and cut down your Maibaum in the night, requiring each village to stand guard over their tree through the night. 😂
Once home again, we started work pretty much straight away and began planting and fixing, but concentrating now on the guest areas.
At some point, I’m going to have to convert the breakfast room back to it’s normal function… I wonder what the odds are that I’ll get ‘those’ curtains made before that time…?! 😉 😝
Stay safe everyone xx
