Thursday, May 14, 2020

Walking to the mall from work takes longer than I expect. I usually cut through an athletes’ park, around basketball and tennis courts, soccer fields, and a skating rink. The park is closed. I don’t know why I didn’t think that it would be. The path around the outside isn’t all that much longer. The streets have good sidewalks. I’m still annoyed. Nothing at the mall looks any different as I approach, other than that there are spaces open in the parking lot. The usual guard sits at the entrance. In theory, the mall can only let a limited number of people in. He doesn’t seem to be keeping count. I don’t know how they could do so, since the mall has multiple entrances. He scans my temperature and waves me in without looking inside my shoulder bag. About half the shops in the mall are open. Most of the clothing stores are closed. They might find dealing with people trying on clothes to be too much of a hassle. The cinema is closed. The restaurants are closed. Seating in the food court is roped off, but several of the eateries are open for to-go orders. I stop into the natural food store where I get my favorite soap. I look for a small bottle of it that I can carry around, but they don’t have them. I ask if they carry small empty bottles designed for that. They don’t. They suggest the drug store down the hall. I get a larger bottle of the soap for my quarantine stash. It would last about a year. At that point I probably would have starved to death, but I’d leave behind a clean body. I get a couple of inexpensive items at the computer store. I do it all in Hebrew until the worker sees my name on my credit card and switches to English. I wish she had switched earlier. She had had trouble fitting the larger item in the bag after she put the smaller one in. Putting the larger one in first would have been easier. I couldn’t put the Hebrew words together to say that. I leave the computer store and swing quickly through the supermarket. I go back to the food court and pick up dinner. I have fifteen minutes to cross the traffic circle between the mall and the bus stop and to catch the last bus. No problem -- except that they have put high fences all around this side of the mall. The whole street is closed while they put in electric tracks to the train station a block away. I walk along the other side of the road, trying to get across to where I expect the buses to run. Giving up, I walk back toward work. I pause at the bus stop outside of the cemetery next door to the office. I don’t think there will be any buses. I have heard that they were supposed to end a few minutes earlier, with no more buses until Sunday. My transit app says that there will be one more. I sit and wait. There is.