Last week, we got some good news.
YAS! Freaking finally!
This is the last of the Covid restrictions.
I’m so glad that they dropped off over the months – no more not being able to eat in restaurants after 6pm, no more having to split people up into groups of 2 or 4 or 6 or whatever in restaurants – or sitting in side by side tables with a barrier between you, no more scanning the Leave Home Safe app whenever you go anywhere, no more taking RAT tests before going inside a club, no more going down to my building’s lift lobby just to pick up all my deliveries.
In one of the WhatsApp GCs (group chats) I’m in, someone sent this suggestion. I’m a sucker for themes, so I of course decided to do this. I put on a full face of makeup which will no longer be smudged by masks, including bright red Mac Ruby Woo lipstick.
What I was not prepared for was to get a feeling of sudden terror overcome me the moment I stepped outside my door without a mask on. I think it was my body’s reaction to having been accustomed to wearing masks for 3 years. It had been so ingrained in me that it became a habit. Now my body was warning me – ERROR! ERROR! MASK NOT FOUND!
But I overcame the feeling and stepped out into a new world.
But not everyone was ready to be that brave. More than half of the people still had their masks on. I wasn’t really surprised by this, because when I first arrived in Hong Kong in 2020, masks were not mandated by the government, yet everyone still wore them. They had all been traumatized from their SARS experience many years ago. So I respect them for that.
In mostly expat-filled GCs, people talked about how they felt kind of peer pressured into wearing masks again when they encountered this situation.
I wasn’t one of those people. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that masks work – it’s possibly the reason why I have never had Covid ever, despite being required to go to work 4 days a week and joining lots of events. But I am just honestly tired of this Covid crap, and I think it has become less deadly anyway, especially since I’m vaccinated.
I celebrated by having my favourite dragon roll sushi from Cooshti in Lee Tung Avenue for lunch.
Then to top it off, I also grabbed a takeaway from Omotesando Koffee. I realized that one thing I can now enjoy by being maskless is sipping a cuppa while walking from Lee Tung Avenue back to my home.
And one more perk I really enjoyed – climbing the steep road back to my home and not being as out of breath now that a mask is no longer restricting my breathing!
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