China – Informative Flights – Musings of a Teacher Librarian

The Time

Time stretches endlessly when you’re in confinement, and unlike say prisoners, there is no fixed schedule for anything. Unless you count our pavlovian response when we hear the rustling on the corridor that signals the twice daily temperature checks or the thrice daily deposit of our plastic containers with the rations for the meals.

Work hasn’t (officially) started yet, but I do have a ton of things I need to do in preparation and a couple of meetings last week, so that leaves a lot of unstructured time. Our Shanghai quarantine WeChat was pretty busy last night with bored people and funny quips, so social media does that a chunk of that time. Just like last year when we were in lock-down and doing online learning that whole question of synchronous / structured vs. asynchronous / unstructured comes into play. Over the last 18 months I’ve decided I’m definitely in the asynchronous camp.

I dislike agendas with times and generally plan my time using the bullet journal style (if you’ve never heard of it, watching this 4 minute video is time well spent) using a filofax so that I can add and remove pages. I start each day writing out my actual commitments that are at definite times and then I just make a list of what I’d like to accomplish, and open all the necessary tabs on my computer and work through and close tabs as I’m done.

Having no commuting time, no set times for waking and sleeping mean that I’m pretty much free do do whatever whenever however and I save about 2 hours a day that’s wasted usually.

Yesterday I experimented with multi-tasking – I had a great book that I needed to finish before it expired (Wish Lanterns – it’s really a great look at modern China through the lives of six young people born in the 80’s) and I needed to get in my 5000 steps minimum, and my neighbour was having a shouting match on the phone with someone. So I paced up and down reading my book on my phone while listening to the gorgeous Symphony # 8 of Dvorak. With some push-ups and squats thrown in every 1000 steps. It takes a LONG time to get in so many steps when your room is 8 paces from door to window.

That symphony is a particular favourite of mine, having played it when I was still an active cello player in the Hong Kong Medical Association orchestra, heavily pregnant with my first child, who now has my cello and plays better than I could ever dream of having played. We’re now officially empty nesters, with the next one off to art college – the reason that we ventured out of China this summer.

For my temptation bundling I decided to bundle two temptations and continued my crochet blanket – nearly done the first 22 colours and getting ready to start the colours again, while watching Netflix – I’m a sucker for medical shows – last quarantine was Offspring (my all time favourite) and this summer / quarantine has been New Amsterdam and The Good Doctor. Interspersed with The Blacklist – BUT my downloads have run out and Netflix doesn’t play nice with streaming. Suggestions for shows welcome.

I had a couple of nice long chats with friends and family and did the work I needed getting done. I also spent a bit of time on the Sisyphusian task of learning Chinese. I’m quite enjoying the self-paced online course I’m doing with GoEast, Yesterday I was trying to sort out my password mess of becoming more secure even on the obscure sites I’m signed up to, many of which I can’t even remember what the heck they’re about. I came across WordSwing again and spent a pleasurable hour or so reading a “solve it yourself” mystery – Murder in the Tea Room (谁杀了李市长?). It was a nice break from the usual studying but knowing myself and the time pressures once normal life resumes I resisted subscribing to it.

I love getting comments from people – Thank you so much to Sabina who suggested some work-out videos – I had a look at them yesterday and even passed them on to a colleague who is currently recovering from foot surgery (yup it’s been quite a year for accidents – I’m not the only one!) I’m going to be trying them out today as I don’t have any books that need urgent reading!

The suck line – choice or tatty towels?

D2. One of the things that has made coming back a little easier have been the many lovely positive messages from my colleagues. I wasn’t sure what to write about today yet, when someone sent me this:

“hope you are all settled in QT hotel. Is there a lot of restrictions? I hope you get good internet, good food, soft bed, enough towel, tile floor, AC, mini fridge, allowances to order in coffee/food and gentle nose swab”

I then rolled out of bed groggily (jet lag meant I’d been up from 4.30am to 2.30am) and went for a shower and contemplated my tatty towel. And had to think of another quote:

“A towel, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.”
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

And thinking back to the 100s of messages in my quarantine group, I wondered where exactly the suck-line lies? Personally I don’t think it’s towels. Of my colleague’s list I actually can only tick off two, maybe three items (the food is a bit hit and miss), and I must admit a small twinge of envy seeing another colleague’s quarantine digs photos, but I don’t feel so badly off. There are people who have no internet or aircon and dirty rooms and (in their view) inedible food.

It’s not even the worst accommodation I’ve stayed in. My husband and I, newly married, with an antenuptial contract that included a stereo and bicycle and steel desk as our assets going into the marriage had just moved to São Paulo, Brazil. We went off in one of the notorious Brazilian night buses to attend a wedding of a friend in Canoinhas. After the wedding we had one more night before returning, but since I’d not yet found a job, and my husband hadn’t had his first salary yet, we only had enough money for either dinner or a flea-bag hotel. We should have taken the dinner. We literally were up all night fighting off the fleas, hearing the other bugs gnawing at the bed posts and being startled by the strange noises on the corridor.

The other very memorable accommodation in terms of discomfort was the 10 day silent retreat I did in Thailand where I slept on a stone slab for 10 nights, and had surrendered all electronic media, all reading and writing materials and had a straw mat to and a single sheet to cover me. It poured with rain for 9 of the 10 days and I don’t think I had a dry item of clothing or anything by the end of it. But it was my choice to do this and I gained more than I had to (temporarily) give up.

And then again there are the more than double digits in moves we’ve done over the years. So I thought the suck line probably is choice rather than towels.

I’ve read just enough (or maybe too much) pop psychology and self-help and seen enough TED-talks to understand that (at least in Western culture) we have the illusion of choice and the illusion that it makes the difference. Knowing my readers, most of you will know about the tyranny of choice – basically (apparently) paraplegics and lottery winners return to baseline happiness a year after the event, and once we make a choice not much can induce us to change our minds.

So I think what galls most people about quarantine in China vs other places is not the fact of it but the lack of choice and control over where we land up – we like lotteries, but only when we choose to play.

I’ll end off with some pictures of yesterday’s meals. I looked at all 3, like last year, so that I could decide which to stick with – being semi-sedentary means that’s way too much food, so I’ll opt for one and cancel the rest, at the moment the winner seems to be lunch. There’s nothing wrong with the food – perhaps a little over-reliance on meat – I pity the vegetarians as even the vegetable bits have meat. But we have to remember that China very recently didn’t have the luxury of meat at every meal let alone every month, so I’m sure it makes most of my fellow-quarantine guest happy to see it in these quantities.

Channeling my inner PollyAnna / stoic

Today marks the first day of my 14+7 quarantine in Shanghai before I can return to Beijing. Unlike last year’s 4 star hotel, I didn’t strike lucky on the hotel jackpot this time, so I’m just focusing on what is good:

the room is clean
no carpet (so no icky marks, hairs and other debris)
nice view
Airconditioning
kettle (and I brought tea)
wifi works
I have electricity
nice shower with good stream and hot water
no food orders (I need to lose some broken ankle induced weight)
I brought my new crochet rainbow blanket project – so I’ll have plenty of time to do that
my neighbour wakes up at 4.30am and has a very loud voice so I get an early start to the day
I have noise cancelling headphones (Chopin ballads are very soothing right now)
I don’t need to wear shoes for 2 weeks
I don’t need to wear a mask for 2 weeks except for my testing on days 1, 4, 7, 14
I have more than enough to read and enough work

With Beijing now at 7 cases (out of a population of 20.8 million people – so please don’t be concerned about me living there), I may need to do a further 7 days of home quarantine before returning to work.

So you arrive at the airport, go through your first set of covid tests and forms and checks, pick up your luggage and then get herded into holding pens. They take your passport and fill in your details and once the holding pen has a bus-load full of people you get put on a bus for a magical mystery bus ride that ends up at a random hotel.

If you’re going into quarantine any time soon, a few things I’d suggest packing include Vitamin D (no sunlight for 14 days); your own plate, bowl, knife, fork, spoon, mug, lots of tea, extension cord, nice toiletries/shampoo etc, noise cancelling headphones & earplugs; perhaps food depending on how fond you are of Chinese quarantine “cuisine” – this time I just brought some anchovies in tins (helps the flavour of bland white rice) and bag of quinoa and “risotto de céréales” that I can “cook” in hot water.

Now I’m off to make my to-do list for the day – thanks to noisy neighbour I’ve unpacked and sorted everything and given the room a good wipe down with disinfectant wipes.

A nerd’s guide to moving house

A slight departure from my usual library and education pondering as we’ve yet again moved country and therefor house. My teenage son asked me the other day how many times we’ve moved in our lives, and we tried to start counting and then were going off on tangents like, “just countries, or while in countries?” and “just since we left home or also while being a child?” (not that that was soooo much as both of us came from fairly non-moving families!) and “does in and out of temporary accommodation while waiting for a home / shipment count?”.

There is some freedom in reducing life to a few suitcases.

So here we go again, this time we’re now in Beijing, China and LOVING it. This was the move, that when we told people they’d say “really? why?” or just look at us as if we’d grown a unicorn horn. Or put on that sympathetic gaze. But ever since I started learning Chinese at HKU 9 years ago, I’ve wanted to live in China. And that even more so since in the 7 years of Singapore I managed to lose 99% of what I’d learnt and deeply regretted it. I joke that doing 2 back-to-back Masters in Education and Information studies pushed all the Chinese out of what was left of my brain. It’s not far from the truth. Changing one’s career radically half way through your 40’s and then starting a new job in said-career doesn’t leave much room for practising a language that’s ironically not that widely used in a Chinese dominant country. It’s the environment. Both in HK and here, you saw Chinese everywhere – the characters that is. In Singapore, English has taken over.

Back to moving. As my husband and I strolled around the “hood” of our new environment last night, we remarked that actually this has been one of our easiest moves. Which may sound strange because it’s the first move we’re doing with me as the dominant career, and that being a teacher rather than a big-shot corporate banker with lots of settling in allowances and a huge administrative department etc. What has made the difference? The school has a designated person whose sole job is to take care of us newbies. Everything and anything we need and a need to know and need to have translated and need to find and need advice on. So after arrival he had our sim cards waiting for us. Anyone who has moved knows how huge this is an how difficult it can be (Singapore I’m looking at you where a “dependant” can’t enter a phone shop without his/her employment pass holder in tow). We went on trips to the bank and to see inside other people’s houses in the most popular living areas. Dinner every night with different people in different locations. Briefings by every department (finance, purchasing, human resources etc.) and so much more I can’t even remember it.

And now, 15 days after arriving, and only 5 days after my family arrived, we are in our home. We had secured it after a visit during the spring break, which meant the lease was signed and ready, so that made things a little swifter too. And because of the onerous visa process, our shipment can’t leave Singapore until our final version has been finalised, we won’t have our “things” until somewhere in October. So for now we’re camping in our house – which isn’t all that much different to camping in temporary accommodation, and it feels a lot better.

Oh I’m verbose – 566 words and now the point of this post – we have a lot of stuff. We did a huge sell and whittle down when we left Singapore and managed to fit everything into one container again. So the stuff this time is a lot less – particularly as I had to whittle our DVD and CD collection to nothing (they’re safely in our holiday home since I don’t do the cloud), and our book collection from about 2,500 books to the 200 we were allowed to bring with us to China (most were donated and given away, the more precious books were sent back to Europe – first editions, the children’s favourite childhood books, my Africana collection, our HK and China collection). So it’s mainly furniture we couldn’t sell, donate or give away because it was either – nearly brand new, or really old and sentimental as it had been passed down from deceased grandparents or bought sometime during our travels around the world.

So now we have that wonderful puzzle of working out how to fit everything that was in a fairly large apartment (over 300 m2) into a 4 storey townhouse with lower ceilings and smaller rooms of about 150 m2 which is more like 120 m2 when you take away the smelly basement that we’ll have to use to store the landlord’s fairly yucky but very welcome – while we’re in transition- furniture. While I’m fairly good at judging space and configuration, one can be badly wrong if you make sure, and if there’s one rule when moving and dealing with strong muscly types that typically move stuff from containers into houses and up stairs it’s “DON’T PISS OFF THE MOVERS”. I can just imagine their tales of stupid rich (it’s a relative term in the countries we’ve lived in, so even on a teacher’s salary we’re rich in their eyes) people not knowing where to put their too much stuff.

And here’s the nerdy stuff. I have a spreadsheet, that I’ve had since we first moved from Brazil to the Netherlands of the dimensions of every piece of furniture we own, it’s cost price and the insurable value. And I keep it up to date as things get left behind or get added. This makes making those darn inventory lists so much easier. It also makes it easier to plan where everything goes in the new place / configuration, because then I either get a house architectural plan from the landlord / agent or I go in and measure up every room (much easier now you can point and shoot with your phone – but I usually still check with a measuring tape). I then enter it all into a floor planner (link to the one I use) and put the furniture into the plan. It’s 3 dimensional – so I can make sure of height as well.