My Peace Corps cohort landed at the airport in Skopje, North Macedonia, at about noon local time on Monday, Sept. 26. After we were tested for COVID-19, we went through passport control, which went smoothly because they’d made arrangements for us to go through a special line. A bus took us to our hotel and we checked in.
The Peace Corps staff had clearly put a lot of thought into preparing for the return of volunteers after an absence of more than two years. But there will always be a few things that they don’t anticipate, and one of those was that they’d have to tell us how to turn on the lights in our hotel rooms.
I presume that most of my readers know that nowadays, it’s rare for hotels in the United States to give guests a metal key. The norm is to give them a plastic card to insert into a card reader, or to touch on a sensor, to unlock the door. That’s also true in Europe, but they also use these cards as a way to avoid wasting electricity. There’s a slot just inside the door where you put your key card to turn on the lights and the electric outlets. This has apparently been the norm in Europe for long enough that it didn’t occur to the Peace Corps staff that some of us had never seen this kind of setup before.
So I entered the room after getting less than two hours of sleep on the planes, utterly exhausted. I couldn’t figure out why flipping the light switches didn’t do anything. Eventually I asked for help. Turned out I wasn’t the only one who had this problem. But eventually we all learned how it works.
Our training is via Zoom, so the first order of business today (Tuesday, Sept. 27) was a Zoom conference about technical setup. This was a smart idea since if anyone was having tech issues, it would be hard to get anything else done. Then we got some orientation about what to expect in pre-service training. After lunch, we had a language program overview, then our first lesson about the Macedonian alphabet.
We’re staying in our rooms most of the day. We’re allowed out to have meals together, but for the first five days, we’re not allowed to leave the hotel.
These COVID-19 precautions are a real nuisance, but we’re cooperating with them. An abundance of caution is sensible.