People say regular international flights won’t resume until late June. It’s pretty sad that I will have to pay a lot for the repatriation flight since I didn’t have a russian airline ticket before. Also I won’t be able to go straight home for the sake of my family’s safety (but mostly their freedom from police surveillance) and will need to find a place for my self quarantine for 14 days. But the weather here is very nice so I’m trying to enjoy the last days of unrestricted walks with social distancing and masks and inspect all matcha shops in town that are still open (and finally empty) Happy in uncertainty •____•

The flight that I couldn’t board yesterday landed in Moscow with two people having very high fever and intense symptoms of covid. All passengers with temperature above 37C were put into a hospital-based quarantine. Maybe I was lucky that I didn’t fit into this stupid arrival limit of Moscow airport together with at least 15 other people. But I had to move out of the dorm because I’m not a student of Kyoto Uni anymore and it turned out to be extremely hard to find a short-term rent in Japan especially when you have no idea when your move-out date is. Two years ago they passed a law here that made most Airbnbs practically illegal, so my options were quite limited: friends’ one-room sharing options, hostels (would be too risky now) or extra expensive hotels (most of cheap ones closed already, there are no tourists anymore). And then something very strange happened. Someone in the Russians-stuck-in-Japan telegram chat posted that a certain hotel in Kanazawa offers free rooms for those whose flights have been cancelled. If it wasn’t Japan I would assume it’s a scam, so I sent them an email just to check. And yep, they instantly replied and said they’re waiting for me next day with anti-viral contactless check in procedure ready. So I packed essential stuff for a few weeks, took a 4hr bus to Kanazawa and here I am.

Apart from sending them photos of my thermometer checks every morning there’s absolutely nothing they need from me. Didn’t even ask for a passport. Best thing is it’s five min walk from SANAA’s 21 century museum, which is closed from today but I managed to run through it yesterday and took tons of pics. coming up soon