My First Flight Since Lockdown (and Ten Things I Learned)

Taken halfway through my flight from Dublin to Chicago.

“You are?” my European friends responded, bug-eyed, to my disclosure that I was flying to America this week.They had been watching CNN or some other similar network, in which the impression was being given that the country was burning to the ground a la Mad Max.I knew better, and dodged the subject: “Well, the flights are really cheap, to be honest, and I can also do some in-person work for a client.”Both reasons were true, but to be honest, the idea of flying post lockdown seemed purely theoretical to me until it actually happened today.

I arrived back in Paris the day before lockdown in March of this year.I had cut short a business/ski trip in Bulgaria under advice from friends, though by Monday night, as I arrived back into Paris with all the shops in the airport already closed, it looked like wisdom.Unbeknownst to any of us who came back that night or in the days after, we would not get to leave the country again for months, and even our daily trips out of our homes would be curtailed with the strange experience for those used to living in free societies: if stopped, we were expected to have “our papers” on us, explaining what we were doing, and why we were doing it, with consequences for “incorrect” answers.

I was delighted when confinement in Paris ended, almost a month ago now, and most of the city is quite…