Friday, September 18th, 2020

The bakery where I get my challah seems radically different, but when I look closely, I see that little has changed. They have finished moving the registers to the front and updated the technology. Customers can swipe their own cards and sign on a screen on a device facing out toward us. I had only seen those before in cafes in the States. The area in the back, behind where it had been, now holds more dark-wood shelves. The counter is the same shade. The flow of customers is smoother. There still isn’t a clear queue, but there’s less crowding. I come up to them with a prewrapped challah from the shelves. “Do you know that that has raisins?” I didn’t. I do now, since I now also know the word for raisins. It’s just right. The workers at the registers keep running out of the right change, The technology develops glitches. They shift back and forth between the machines, still able to keep the transactions straight in ways that baffle me. Outside, the street is swarming with shoppers. The lockdown starts in a few hours, and the New Year starts in the evening, so people are grabbing last minute items. The shinier new bakery around the corner has two large signs: “During lockdown, we will be open as usual.” I suppose that they will close off the seating area. I get lunch at my favorite shawarma joint. The owner and I wish each other a good year. The street corner violinist sits a few meters from where he usually stands. Rather than the usual pop and classical tunes, he is playing languid melodies against a recorded drone. The sliding and wavering pitches and continual double-stops sound more like carnatic music than his usual, very Western playing. At the phone store across the street, I pick up some video equipment that I’d been wanting. It’s inexpensive consumer tech, but it puts together pieces that I’ve been wanting more affordably than I’d seen them separately. Once home, I work on launching my newsletter, now that I’ve hit my self-imposed deadline. I doze off for some of the afternoon, then hunker down for several quiet days of holiday isolation.