Friday 26 November 2021, Day 57 of Level 1, #BlackFriday 😷

Corona Gratitude 🙏

#grateful for a day of extreme contrasts, waking up to the dreadful news of the UK putting us back on the Red List, with the rest of the world (or so it seems) banning flights from our country, the UK, Germany, and the USA bans hitting our tourism industry particularly hard, my clients and tourism players devastated today, but we’ve been through tough times before and we will survive; for a wonderful 7 hour continuous sleep, and then firing away with the work which needed to be done this morning; for the rain holding off when I was in town to attend a Brand talk hosted by Tania Olivier, meeting such lovely marketing girls sitting next to me, exchanging restaurant news, especially about The Winchester 😱; for bumping into Sabine Palfi on the way, so lovely to see her again after two years; for popping in at Zest and newkings, to do some photography, having a cup of tea with my client Martine, and receiving the Zest New Years Eve menu 🥂🍾, and succumbing to a healthy Zest salad, the rain coming down in buckets by then; for fetching my German tourist clients at their hotel and joining them for dinner at Utopia, where we were spoilt with a fabulous dinner of oysters and bubbly, ribeye steak and ice cream, bumping into birthday girl Mandy Dewing and Uschi W. van Zweel, Facebook friends celebrating the special birthday, with a 21st, a 40th, and a 60th birthday celebrated too, with a Saints and Sinners theme, dressed as devils or angels, such an amazing vibe, and then Utopia laid on an amazing rainbow and a thunder and lighting show for us 👏👏👏⛈💧, with rain pelting down; for the electrician coming to install new exterior light fittings; and for being happy, healthy and free. 🙏💙

My Blogpost today was about the Travel Bans, a Black Friday we do not need!

Black Friday for SA tourism industry as UK puts SA back onto Red List, followed by European Union!

On top of the stress of the day our Parisian Ebbtide Trustee Magali Seguillon lost the plot, being abusive to our Building Manager Henry about not sending her photographs of an extension of our electric fencing, which I sent to her as soon as he had taken the pics. The whole day she wrote emails crying like a baby about being unfairly treated and discriminated against because Henry had sent the photographs to me to approve, instead of to her directly, with the insinuation that she was paying part of his salary and that he wasn’t doing his job properly! I took the blame but that didn’t help either. And the word THANK YOU does not exist in the Trustees’ vocabulary, for what Henry and I do as a team for Ebbtide. Pheewwwww 😱😱😱

And then I had to cancel an Influencer with 18000 plus Followers, who requested a Freebie from one of my clients, not being shy to make the request, but not wanting to deliver on our expectations of the number of Instagram posts and Reels which we expect in return. Pheeeeewwwww 😱😱😱

Overall a day with a shock beginning, and a wonderful ending. ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

SA Corona Status: 2,952,500 cases 89771 deaths 25,123,452 vaccinations

FitBit 5000 steps 3 km 👣

LovemylifeandloveGaryslife 💙❤️

 

The Corona Virus Lockdown (Level 5), announced by our President Cyril Ramaphosa earlier to commence on 27 March 2020 and to continue until 16 April, subsequently extended to 30 April, lowered to Level 4 from 1 May, lowered to Level 3 from 1 June, lowered to Level 2 from 18 August, lowered to Level 1 from 21 September, and moved back to Adjusted Level 3 from 29 December,  extended to 15 February on 11 January 2021, extended but relaxed on 1 February, and relaxed back to Level 1 on 1 March 2021, moved back to Adjusted Level 2 on 31 May, moved back to level 3 on 16 June, and moved back to Adjusted Level 4 on 28 June, extended by two weeks on 11 July,  returned to Level 3 on 26 July, returned to Level 2 on 13 September, and returned to Level 1 on 1 October is an unprecedented event in my lifetime. I am posting my daily Facebook post to journal this Corona Lockdown Journey, perhaps to serve as material for a future Book.

Chris von Ulmenstein, WhaleTales Blog: www.whaletalesblog.com www.chrisvonulmenstein.com/blog Tel +27 082 55 11 323 Twitter:@Ulmenstein Facebook: Chris von Ulmenstein, My Cape Town Guide/Mein Kapstadt Guide Instagram: @Chrissy_Ulmenstein @MyCapeTownGuide