Auf Wiedersehen, Göttingen

It's been crickets here for a while, I know. I worked long hours in January and February for various reasons: it was planning and budgeting season, the coronavirus (COVID-19) was ramping up in Asia, I was getting ready for eight weeks long service leave, and of course there were a few of those those random requests that send you chasing your tail for no outcome at all. Gotta love those.

On 28 February I started my long service leave, and on the same day, got on a flight to Germany to do a language course. Studying at the Goethe Institut in Germany and doing the level C2 exam (a proficiency standard for European languages) has been top of my bucket list for years. David wanted to come with me and do a beginners German course. We were supposed to be gone for just over a month, but the Coronavirus situation escalated very quickly. Die Welt has published a fantastic animated graphic showing just how quickly things moved in countries outside China from late February. Every morning we got up something else had changed.

On Sunday night 15 March we learned that our German courses were cancelled along with the exam I was studying for. It was unavoidable but annoying, as both of us were really enjoying the course. Within two weeks, I had gone from being quite terrified and certain I would be unable to pass the exam to confident that I could. We cancelled our planned trip to Berlin at the end of the month. Then, the Australian government advised that citizens should return home as soon as possible, and there were rumours about the financial viability of airlines including one we were flying with.

The beautiful city of Göttingen where we were based started to close down. Shops and restaurants shut, public transport stopped taking cash and then started cutting services. Unable to contact the airlines as contact centres failed, we hot tailed it to Frankfurt airport to try and bring our flights forward in person, to no avail. Then the Tasmanian government announced new entry restrictions. We ended up forking out $3,800 on new flights to get home before even tougher travel restrictions came into force. Which we won't get back as travel insurance does not cover you in a pandemic.

I won't deny that having to say goodbye to my dream and the prospect of having nothing to look forward to again sent me into a bit of a downward spiral. But compared to the impact of this crisis on other people's lives and livelihoods, it's nothing. We're now into day two of 14 days self-isolation. I definitely won't be bored, as there is a long list of things I was planning to do in April, many of which can be done at home. Posting here is one of them.