Curfew, Day 3 – How is life in Santo Domingo during the Coronavirus? – Page 3

Where are the Dominican people during the Coronavirus?

I was in need of a few commodities anyway. So I went to the supermarket Nacional to check the supplies. And I was interested if Dominican people continued with panic buying like I observed it last Sunday. And especially to check out the toilet paper shelves. That topic became quite a runner in the last days.

It looked better than I thought:

You can never shit enough in life and have enough toilet paper ready. Between next diarrhea and the next apocalypse isn’t a big difference. At least for some people.

The rest of the supplying shelves looked okay with a few exceptions:

The 1st picture should actually show bags of rice. Of 5 – 10 kg. For all people of the non-metric system: That’s quite a lot and I probably don’t eat that during a whole year.

In the 2nd picture, however, you should be able to see some sort of Ramen noodles and canned food. The ready-made meals, easy and quick to prepare and very nutritious. Just taste like scorched car tires. But I guess, you would rather eat that before starving to death.

But the 3rd picture is weird somehow. All the basic ingredients to prepare Lasagne at home. Quite difficult and time-consuming before ready to eat. But time seems to be the most precious element nowadays. So why not investing in preparing Lasagne?

Other than that, I couldn’t take notice of any abnormalities in the supermarket. Oh yeah, I wanted to write about the people. The few I saw in the supermarket and on the streets are well prepared but also a bit terrified. Many wear respiratory protections, some even gas masks:

In a strange way, I felt bad for myself. Because I wasn’t prepared either with gloves or with any respiratory mask. I simply don’t have these things at home and never bought them before. But that’s probably something like a social factor. What you observe others do, reflects your own (mis-)behavior and makes you think twice.

On the floor, the supermarket owners glued some duct tape to force the customers to wait in line with distance. A clever measure, but people were anyway quite distant to each other.

A little too much to translate everything. But as a sign of solidarity, the supermarket, and the pharmacy is opened from 7am – 8 am exclusively for elderly people over 65 years. A really beautiful idea from them!

But I hope that this curfew is soon over. Same with the Coronavirus. Life should please soon return to normality. I don’t recognize the Dominican Republic with all its distant people wearing gas masks, all the strict rules and empty streets. I want my real and authentic Colonial Zone back!