The year of 2020

After my previous post, something really big hit the world. It came upon us without warning just few weeks into 2020, and COVID-19 had hit us really hard as people are fearful, plans are disrupted and people are losing their lives around the world.

My original big plan for this year was to be on the plane ride at this moment, heading to Tokyo for Tokyo marathon 2020, it was supposed to be my 10th marathon and my first WMM. I had tried my luck for a chance to run the race and I failed to get a place for three consecutive years, finally I was 4th time lucky but this happened. I was still doing my long runs just before CNY this year but things got really bad after that. Our CNY was spent in PH in the most extraordinary way as COVID-19 had just landed in SG so we spent the holidays glued to our phones with news and updates coming in everyday.

We went ahead with the trip (cloth masks more for looking cool)

Things got worse after that and now Tokyo marathon was announced to be canceled this year (bummer, but I was already planning to abort the trip) and all of us got deferred to next year's race. I think I was not as affected as other runners as I already made up my mind that it was too risky to go ahead with the race. It's not that I'm afraid of contacting the virus, but there's too many complications if people around me are affected. 

Best souvenirs

There are just a few cases of COVID in PH till now yet in SG we are hitting 100 soon. Before we left PH, I'm glad we decided to be really 'kiasu' and stock up on hand sanitizers and bottles of 70% alcohol, there was no competition there anyway and P had been using such bottles of alcohol at home since I met him. We even managed to get 30 pieces of masks at very cheap price on the first day of CNY at Manila, but it went out of stock when we tried to get more before coming back to SG. We had wanted to help friends and family get a lot masks but we were not able to find them. I gave out those bottles of hand sanitizers to my colleagues after we got back. 

My anti virus supply

Over the past few weeks, I went through many channels to stock up on some masks, disinfectant sprays, hand sanitizers and Vitamin C. I'm glad the stocks are replenishing on the shelves already and prices are falling and things are slowly getting back to normal (for SG but not the rest of the world) right now. I'm crossing my fingers that things will stay this week as I feel kind of sad that we cant travel till a few months later *crossing my fingers*. We have big plans for travel this year as I've booked June trip to US and year end trip to Europe on top of two other trips to Japan. The wanderlust is killing me right now. :(