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THE WAY WE WORK NOW
I’m a Food and Travel Influencer Filming Videos as Countries Go Into Lockdown
The Way We Work Now is a series chronicling how people’s lives and careers have fundamentally changed because of the pandemic.
Luke Martin, 26, is a Canadian food and travel influencer who operates the YouTube channel Chopstick Travel. He spoke with Mai Tran in mid-November about traveling to film new videos amid the latest surge in Covid-19 cases around the globe.
Right now, I’m in the parking lot of a grocery store in Turkey and I’m loading up on groceries. The country’s going into a partial lockdown tonight at 8 p.m. All the restaurants are only going to be doing takeout, so we won’t be able to film videos. The next place we had planned to go to was Dubai, but because of the quarantine, they’ve canceled all the flights there. Whereas we usually plan things a month or two ahead of time, now we’re changing plans the day before. We’re trying to make decisions and we’re running with Covid on our heels.
The first time I heard about Covid, I was finishing up filming in Malaysia. I had a trip planned to Korea and then they had an outbreak. It was the first place outside of China where Covid had spread, so we called off the whole trip and went back to our base in Taiwan. At the very beginning, there were no border restrictions or quarantining, so we were able to spend a few months filming our videos without being affected. But eventually, we had to keep traveling because it’s part of our job, and our visa wasn’t allowing us to stay in Taiwan. So we decided to leave. For the last three or four months, it’s been pretty rough trying to travel.
We have to pick countries based on, “What’s the appropriate thing to do? Where can we film videos? Where do we feel safe?” We also had to look at whether it’s going to be worth quarantining or not. Greece only required a test, then we visited Canada…
