Global Village - Storytelling Brings us Together

Edited BY G P Kennedy Ian & Minako – Tokyo Hello again from Tokyo, we are both well. We're enjoying proper October weather now, still quite warm, highest of 20 degrees with plenty of sunshine. Great for walking around the parks and streets. The daily average for new coronavirus cases is still level, this week at 152 in Tokyo, there have been 30,033 in total and 447 deaths.  Nationally the daily average is up a bit to 572 with 97,106 in total and 1716 deaths. The largest group of new cases continues to be people in their 20s and 30s. Clusters include 17 members of a university soccer team, a group of foreign nationals at a vocational school, and 9 students who had taken part in a drinking and karaoke party a week earlier. Things are still stable and quiet here corona-wise and the authorities are always looking for ways to keep it that way or make improvements. Christmas is not a holiday in Japan but New Year is a big thing with businesses closing for 3 days, families gather to...

 Edited BY G P Kennedy Sally - London, UK  Week 30 wow wow wow, where has the year gone? It’s crazy and scary and sad as there seems to be no end in sight! So the UK is in a very confused position at the moment and England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales all have very different ways to try and control it. England is running off a 3-tier rule, where different areas are in different tiers depending on the levels of Corona Virus.  London is in tier 2 and Liverpool is in tier 3. Scotland and Northern Ireland both have a 5-tier rule (each different) again areas are put into particular tiers depending on the numbers of the virus.  Wales is on what is being called a 2-week ‘firebreak’, where the whole of Wales is on lockdown and all businesses are shut down apart from shops selling essential items.  This has caused a lot of uproar as major supermarkets have closed off certain aisles of items, which they don’t deem to be essential such as period products, clothes...

 Edited BY G P Kennedy Gul – in two places at once, Turkey  We just spent the last week of summer 2020. The weather was so beautiful, warm and like the one – all your troubles were delayed. As we expected, there are still many people on the site where we stayed. We invite each other to coffee every day. I still love to read alone on the beach. While Mike lectures via the Internet I’m running to the beach. But I miss my books in Istanbul; we have left fewer books here naturally.  COVID NEWS  Apparently, Istanbul – a city of 16 million people, has recorded 40 % of Turkey’s virus cases, the health minister says. The pandemic is re-escalating in the entire country now. As always the Health Minister ridiculously avoided giving figures but said the number of cases in Istanbul is five times the cases in the capital Ankara. I have a few friends who have COVID in Istanbul. It must be worse than March- April.  We won’t be having our flu jabs this year as there are no...

 Edited BY G P Kennedy Ellie - Milan, Italy What a week has the past one been. The weather has been wet and semi-dreary, as these new yard mushrooms attest, but to top it off, the pandemic numbers in Italy have been pretty dreary, too. Things are better than France, for example, but it's a little consolation when we remember what past spring was like.   It's also chachi season, which is actually a little bit of a bigger consolation. I've been waiting for this soft, juicy, and honest thing (I mean, you can't conserve it beyond it's picking moment) for a whole year. I was thinking that this year we might have to forgo them, as they are so tricky to grow and distribute. To have them now feels almost like luck.    So the news of the week is, now that most outdoor seating in restaurants is unthinkable (rain! fog!), and with the coronavirus curve climbing, restaurants have to close at 6pm. Italians eat way after that time; let's say that 8pm is happy hour and 10pm is ...

 Edited BY  G P Kennedy Tassy – Karachi, Pakistan I hope the week finds all of you well. Covid-19 cases continue to climb in Pakistan. But, the total number of cases per capita still remains significantly lower than neighboring India, and many other countries. That could be attributed partially to testing being abysmally low. The past week saw only 30,000 daily tests taking place despite a population of 180 million. According to some international Covid-19 trackers, Pakistan’s daily testing at 0.14 per thousand is sadly among the lowest in the world! People feel that confirmed cases being recorded by the laboratories are a fraction of the true number of cases that actually exist in the country. But even if that was true, what is encouraging is that death rates in Pakistan still remain low. I have been trying to continue my life as normal as I can make it. I still am one of the small percentages of the population that observe the wearing of masks.  The concept of social ...

 Edited BY G P Kennedy   Simon – Perth, WA  Hey everyone, hope you are keeping well.  Entertainment….I suppose it means different things to different people? Is it TV? A social activity? A hobby? A means to escape the daily grind? For me, I suppose it’s a way to leave work behind and have fun and/or relax. It’s been such a hard year for all the obvious reasons that I’m sure everyone needs something to take them away from it all.  When the pandemic started over here there was a real sense of panic over where we would be at after a few months of it. Nobody knew where we would be at. Would we have a job? Stuck at home being paid by the government? Stuck at home with nothing? So much crazy stuff went down in that first few months. There was a massive spike in people panic buying vegetable seeds, worm farms, chickens…lots of people thought they would be living out of their back yard forever. Everyone was bulk-buying flour like they were going to bake their way back t...

 Edited BY G P Kennedy Ian and Minako – Tokyo, Japan   This week we are talking about entertainment. So, what is entertainment?  ‘The action of providing or being provided with amusement or enjoyment.’  We are entertained constantly.  We can find amusement in most things; people, pets, birds; words, and actions, even leading politicians can make us laugh.  Enjoyment too is easily gained from the things we do ourselves in our daily life – eating, walking, talking, listening, watching, meditating, playing, hobbies etc. As we have mentioned before, not a lot has changed for us personally here in Tokyo, especially once the state of emergency was lifted. We enjoy seeing different places no matter how near or far but that has been difficult this year so far.    We love art and despite the current difficulties Tokyo has continued to provide us with fun exhibitions such as the Stars exhibition of 6 contemporary Japanese artists currently on at the Mori a...

x Edited BY G P Kennedy Ellie - Milan, Italy   At the beginning of the lockdown, we all switched both to an intensive search for entertainment and to a digital experience equivalent to everything. Naturally, these converged to digital entertainment. It was the biggest one for me, too, whether taking advantage of the many movie streaming options that suddenly became available, like these super cool Georgian movies  http://georgiatoday.ge/news/20222/Georgian-Filmmakers-Release-Their-Films-Online-for-Free  or, of course, all the museum and gallery tours that were available online. I especially loved the Getty Museum digital presence. In addition, zoom happy hours with friends. online talks and similar opened doors to a deluge of fun that could now be more expansive and geographically unmoored because of the pandemic.   However, not only did it become old very quickly but it also made me be deeper entrenched in my perspective of un-digitality. You see, I consider my wo...

Edited BY G P Kennedy  Gul – The Aegean Coast, Turkey  I have been a fan of Netflix since its start. Since the start of lockdown, I have subscribed to more platforms, as I didn’t know how to fill our days. I thought it was the best time to watch the movies and programs that saved in ‘watch later’. But that didn’t happen. Still, 61 programs are waiting to be watched on my list on Netflix.  I can divide my COVID times into two. The very early lockdown days when we were attached to our TV in our apartment in the city. Now, Netflix & DVD’s suddenly have disappeared from our daily lives. I am busy wondering, what’s going on in the world?    Since June, we find ourselves safer and more comfortable in this coastal area, but this time we were mainly outside so the entertainment part of our lives almost stopped. I recently started to explore the world from the home, started checking what’s on Netflix or Mubi. I must say that I have listened to a lot of music in rece...