TESTING TRAVAILS

We’d been in Europe for three days, and we’d tried to do everything right, but now it looked like we could face a 250€ fine from the Belgian government.

We had spent the day with 3M friends in the scenic town of Knokke-Heist, enjoying delicious meals and bicycling along the North Sea coast. On beautiful, paved paths, we’d biked through nature reserves and sheep-covered farmland, and even across the border to the quaint Dutch village of Sluis.

As we said goodbye to our hosts and headed toward Bruges, my phone rang. It was the Belgian authorities. Due to a “Personal Locator Form” we’d submitted at the beginning of our trip, on the advice of the airline, they were tracking us.

The woman on the line was polite and soft-spoken, but also firm. She told me that if we planned to be in Belgium for more than 48 hours, which we did, we needed to get covid tests and then quarantine until we got the results.

That was a big ask. Did she really think that tourists who were vaccinated and had no symptoms would remain in their hotel rooms? But I gave her credit for trying. Maybe persistence is one reason Belgium is a European leader in fighting covid. According to our friends, outside of Brussels, it has a 91% vaccination rate.

We arrived in Bruges a half hour later, and the hotel clerk informed us that Belgium has an honor system regarding testing. If we were stopped, and found without the required test results, he said, there was a 250€ fine. Thus, immediately after checking in, we headed to a nearby “Apothekery,” paid 30 € each, and got rapid covid tests. The results would be available in a few hours.

To access our results, we had to visit a website, entering a long string of numbers, letters, and symbols into our phones. Then we had to enter eight-digit codes. After doing that, the program asked us if we were robots. To prove we weren’t, we had to pass a one-question test.

That is where we got stuck. Even though the first part of the website was in English, the quiz was in Dutch, and we had no idea how to decipher it. We decided to go down to the reception desk and ask for help. There, we watched the clerk ace the test by selecting all of the photos of cars from a tiny gallery. The site responded that our results weren’t ready. Later, when we went back into the site, the test question had, of course, changed. And the front desk was closed for the evening.

We’d gotten our tests, but we didn’t know the results. Certainly not what the Belgian authorities wanted. I pictured us taking an early evening stroll around Bruges and being stopped and hit with a 250€ fine.

Sankar is more patient than I am. He went in and out of the program five or six times. It would “speak” English all along, but then switch to Dutch for the robot test. Back and forth, back and forth, he went, until finally, miraculously, the English came through. Hurrah! We passed the robot test! And our covid tests were both negative. Double hurrah!

SAFE TO TRAVEL?

We’d had second thoughts about taking a trip in the middle of a Delta surge. Our plan, hatched in the golden days of late spring, 2021, was to spend two days in Amsterdam; an overnight with (vaccinated) Belgian friends near that country’s coast; two nights in Bruges; and then two nights in Trier, Germany, before returning to Amsterdam and then home. An eight-day, late-August trip.

We are both vaccinated, so what, we wondered, was the worst thing that could happen? One or both of us could get mildly sick. Or more seriously ill, which we felt was unlikely. Still, recent news about viral loads made us wonder. This quote, in a New York Times letter to the editor on August 26, seemed to sum up the situation: “Instead of making it to the light at the end of the tunnel, it seems that we are going to have to learn to see in the dark.”

I also wondered if it would be safe to travel overseas because it involved spending a great deal of time with several hundred strangers. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the people that would be close to me, breathing in and breathing out. Several friends assured me that ventilation systems on planes had been upgraded and were excellent, but I wasn’t convinced.

It was only when I was seated on the plane that I came to my senses. Every single one of the people around me was vaccinated (it was requirement to enter the European Union). Every single one had tested negative for covid within the last 72 hours, also a requirement. And every single one was wearing a mask. There wasn’t a better group in the entire world with whom to spend the next eight hours! I’d been in a spiral of illogical anxiety.

We did also realize that, once in Europe, we could get word that we had been exposed to covid, and asked to stay and quarantine for a week or two. Or, we could test positive prior to returning home, which would also put us in quarantine. We were prepared for those possibilities. While packing, I tucked in a few extra items in case we had to stay longer. We had nothing back home that required our prompt return.

In addition to being thrilled about finally traveling, we were curious about how other countries were handling the pandemic. What kinds of precautions would they be taking? Would they be more, or less conscientious than us Americans? And, with our health antennae up, would we feel safe to travel in three different foreign countries?

Just two years ago, a blog about a trip to the Low Countries would have been a sleeper. But now, I felt like an intrepid traveler, taking my readers where they dared not go!

Before we took off, we listened as the flight crew issued the same lengthy reminder no less than three times (“. . . It is a federal offense to refuse to wear a mask. . .”). I no longer felt afraid, and even forgot I was wearing a mask, except when turning in for the night. It is annoying to have material over your nose when you’re trying to sleep. I solved that problem by pulling the blanket over my head (it’s also a barrier, right?) and pushing my mask down to my upper lip.

IN LOVE WITH AMSTERDAM

After eight hours, we were in Amsterdam, a hub we’d landed in many times before, but always heading elsewhere. This time, we were going to stay. Temperatures were in the 60s, but it felt good to wear jackets after our hot Minnesota summer.

It wasn’t long before we were gliding  alongside a series of curving waterways toward our hotel. I knew Amsterdam featured canals, but I had no idea of their extent. Turns out they hug the Oud Stad (Old City) in a watery grid. And the streets between are them festooned with flowers. And then there’s the bicycles! Armies of citizens were pedaling along using their own marked lanes. Sankar remarked that Dutch bikes reminded him of the one he’d had in India fifty years ago, sturdy and upright, dark in color, and without any gears.

Neither of us visited Amsterdam in the seventies, when it was at its hippie apex, so we had no memories to rewrite.  For us, the city was bright and fresh. As we strolled, it felt like we were being pulled along, one slim, brick canal house and quaint, curved bridge after the other. We walked seven miles the first day, and six the second.

Amsterdam is full of world-class museums, among which, with some difficulty, we selected three, the Resistance Museum; the Van Gogh Museum, located near the Rijksmuseum; and Our Lord in the Attic, a hidden Catholic chapel dating to the 1600s when, due to conflict with Spain, that faith had fallen out of favor. We chose well: it was an interesting, thought-provoking variety.

The Dutch people are tall: it wasn’t uncommon to see attractive couples strolling along, he about 6 feet 3 and she over 6 feet tall. The people we met were cheerful and helpful. The city is also interestingly diverse, with immigrants from many places including little-known Surinam.

We ate good food, mostly continental, but also croquettes (delicious, but how do they deep fry something that isn’t solid to begin with?). One afternoon, we saw a familiar sight, the Turkish Simit Sarayı, where we happily munched borek and drank ayran.

“I didn’t see one service person wearing a mask,” Sankar commented as we drove out of Amsterdam toward Belgium. It was true. We hadn’t seen many masks on the streets either, and only sparingly inside public buildings. At the Van Gogh Museum, an entrance sign advised that masks weren’t required but that “others would feel safer if you were masked.” We stood in clumps, gazing at paintings and reading the accompanying placards. And even though I was masked, that was the only time on the trip that I felt vulnerable.

EXQUISITE BELGIUM

On to astonishingly green Belgium, which, our hosts told us, had experienced more rain this summer since the 1840s. And that country, covid-wise, was a different story. Every indoor public space required masks. Museums. Hotel lobbies and hallways. Restaurants as you entered and exited. And everybody was complying.

Our Belgian friends told us that the Dutch “say what they think,” but Belgians are more diplomatic. We found Belgians kind and gracious, careful, and exacting (that impression from the precise, right-angled trimming of most shrubbery). We ate more croquettes in Belgium, and also frittes, French fries, which our guidebook insisted were Belgian, not French in origin. I stay away from them in the States, but when traveling, why not? They are served with mayonnaise, which sounds odd, but is actually quite tasty.

Bruges was a wealthy town in medieval times, and remains austere and beautifully preserved. Graceful trees line quiet banks of canals that ring the city. We enjoyed a free canal tour, part of a city promotion (lots of smiles under the obligatory masks); visited a first-class weekly outdoor market; and after that just wandered around, basking in the ambience. It was a quiet and peaceful couple of days.

With our 20^th century mindsets, we had worried about showing papers, in this case, vaccination documents, while crossing European borders. But the actual borders were almost nonexistent, less noticeable than going from one U.S. state to another.

GERMANY’S OLDEST TOWN

Germany’s oldest town, Trier, is small, but bustling, nestled in a green valley only about fifty kilometers from the Belgian border. Its main attractions are a half-dozen Roman structures dating from 30 BCE to the 300s CE. These include a spa, a bridge, a city gate, and an old church. Also, a gigantic building called The Basilika, that served as Emperor Constantine’s throne room, and is the largest, unsupported single room to survive from ancient times. Some of these monuments were located alongside busy intersections, making sightseeing a little hectic.

The citizens of Trier, Germany displayed the same covid caution as those in Belgium, wearing masks in all public indoor spaces. At an outdoor ampitheatre, as we paid the 4€ entrance free, we were reminded to put on our masks, asked for our vaccination papers, and required to fill out a form with our address and telephone number. This, we later learned, was to notify us for possible quarantine if it was determined that we’d been exposed to Covid.

In Germany, we received no official phone calls upon arriving, but instead, thanks to another Personal Locator form, we got a text asking us to get tested.

Testing in Trier involved a trip up to the hills surrounding the town, the test facility located in a set of temporary structures outside a medical office complex. We chose PCR tests over Schnell Tests, costing us a whopping 75 euros each. Since this result would (hopefully) allow us to return home in two days, we wanted something highly accurate.

Getting the results was, thankfully, easier than in Belgium. First, we went to www.corona-results, and then we each entered a code and our birth date. No robot quiz, and Sankar pulled up both of our (negative) results on his phone. But then he wasn’t able to text a screenshot to me. We surmised that perhaps this was a security feature to prevent widespread texting of results. We were able to link the results to our passport numbers, a feature that made leaving the EU smoother, but which some people might find intrusive.

Leaving the test site, we stopped and took in a lovely panorama of the town. We could see the Imperial Baths illuminated by the morning sun, the Mosel River flowing behind the city, and a vineyard whose rows of plantings seemed to descend the hill at a 45-degree angle. But for the test, we wouldn’t have driven up to that height, and we decided to count the splendid view and our resulting photos into our 150€ outlay.

 

It’s hard to convey how wonderful our trip was. Not because of highly spectacular or world-renowned sights—in Europe, most of those are located elsewhere. It was simply the chance to get away. To see, hear, taste, and feel something different.

In our eight days overseas we were constantly aware of covid regulations and that kind of thing might have seemed like a spoiler just a short time ago. But now, it was not. Even though fraught, this opportunity to discover new places–and to fall in love with Amsterdam–was much sweeter because of the twenty isolated months that proceeded it.

Trips are short, but memories are long, and we are already cherishing these newest ones. Was it safe to travel? Yes!

Related links:

• One in 5,000, by David Leonardt
• Show me the Data, Zeynep Tufekci 
• Book, Amsterdam, by Russell Shorto