Love to hear that the country is basically one big amusement park and the tourists are just our collective “job”!
If that doesn’t sound shitty enough to you or if you don’t understand what it’s about, here’s some context:
Only about 20% of the population has received any vaccine doses and only around 10% has been fully vaccinated. The hospitals have been at their limits for a long time and all that is despite excessively strict lockdown measures in some regards and excessively lax in others for much longer in general than anyone else in Europe as far as I know. Basically every time the situation was getting a bit better, they immediately relaxed the measures a little bit, then it got worse after like 5 days so they tightened back the measures. Eventually the British strain took over. This meant that we’ve been in perpetual lockdown for months now with no results. It’s been so long with 0 results and the measures are so weird, confusing, non sensical and unnecessarily restrictive that no one gives a shit about them any more so most of them have become unenforcable.
The motivation behind the strict measures was to eliminate Covid so that the country can open up for tourists in the summer. Except obviously that didn’t happen because they’re incompetent morons. But regardless of the surge the country is still gonna open up now. A few days ago open air restaurants, cafes, taverns etc opened up. This wasn’t bad because as I said previously it’s been some time since people have gotten sick of the often very strict restrictions and right now people meeting others out in the open in taverns and cafes with restrictions in the number of tables per square meter etc is preferable to people piling up in each others’ homes or doing massive parties in city squares. But what no sane person is looking forward to is the tourists. It was clear that when summer comes the government will just ignore the covid situation and let tourists in. But tourists are the fucking worst possible thing for covid transmission. It was tourism during the summer of 2020 which brought us here in the first place, before that we had practically 0 new cases per day thanks to the first lockdown, which did work very well. Tourists bring with them new covid variants, and as if that isn’t enough, tourists never stay in their hotel rooms, which, uh, of course they don’t, no one goes to a different country to stay in place. They eat out all the time. They tend to congregate in specific places en masse. They also tend to get drunk as fuck and barf everywhere. That’s pretty much the whole reason they come here, they don’t come here to do social distancing and self isolation. And it’s not just a few people. In a normal year the tourists that come in are 3x the population of the country. This won’t be a normal year but it’s still gonna be lots.
Here’s the truly crazy thing though. There’s this one measure that is just annoying as fuck and completely nuts. In order to get out of your house, you have to send an SMS with your name, your location, and the reason you are leaving your house. You can chose one out of 6 possible reasons. 9/10 times none of the reasons really matches what you need to do and the rules are getting increasingly complicated.
Here’s one example of how weird the rules are, if your head starts feeling heavy, just skip it:
There’s a new number where you send an SMS now which works in parallel with the other one and that number only accepts one SMS per day and it’s for shopping now that that’s opened up but the other number is also for shopping but it’s about necessities (that’s code 2) and with the new number you can leave your town and go somewhere else to shop but you can’t do that for necessities and in fact you can only go to a supermarket that is within a 2km radius from where you live but you can actually get outside of the town as long as you are within a 2km radius, as opposed to going for a walk which is code 6 and you can go further than 2km but only as long as it is within your town, except if it is a weekend, since recently it was changed so that you can use code 6 to go outside your town on weekends but still inside your county which you can’t leave for any reason afaik right now except you can leave the country so basically you could leave the country and return to a different country and that’s fine but it’s just that you can’t go from one to the other while you are within Greece, anyways in all cases you have to come back before 23:00 which recently went up from 22:00, which in turn had gone up from 21:00 for all days, but before that it used to be 21:00 for week days and 19:00 for weekends, except of course there was always code 1 which is urgent doctor visit which you could use to circumvent the curfew, and I forgot to mention that recently code 6 has been expanded to also include sitting at a cafe or restaurant which btw while they are allowed to operate they can’t have music, as well as swimming in the sea but only as long as the sea is close enough to you or if it is a weekend, and now you can also go fishing but which you couldn’t before, but you can only do that as long as you are no further from I believe 600m from the shore, for some reason.
Yeah.
It’s basically become impossible to not unintentionally break the law in one way or the other just for coming out of your house. So the SMS thing is one ridiculous restriction that everyone hates. Another one is the curfew. Neither measure is working at anyways and people break them all the time by now. Finally a lot of people are annoyed by the fact that you can’t move between counties, since it’s isolated many people from their loved ones or even made working really hard for some.
The reason the minister of development (he’s an ex telemarketer btw who used to sell Holocaust denialist books to boomers) was talking about how tourists are “our job” is that the government decided that obviously it is moronic to try and impose all these weird fucking rules to tourists. However, they haven’t decided the same thing for the rest of us. The tourists have more rights than citizens. It’s not just him, it’s a bunch of other vampires in the government too. All of them are talking about how tourists bring us money so we have to make sacrifices for them, and yes, they literally use the word “sacrifice”. Whooooo I love sacrificing myself so that drunk brits can get drunk more conveniently to generate profit for mobsters who own bars in Mykonos and airlines! WE NEED MORE SACRIFICES FOR THE TOURISM GOD.
I’m doooooone…