Seriously – I’ve been properly back at work since yesterday and the days are flying by. Tomorrow will mark the half way mark of quarantine and I was just taking a break a minute ago lamenting that my crochet rate has declined dramatically. The banter in my group has also quietened down since the weekend as my fellow “guests” are also gainfully and seriously occupied. I’ve given up on trying to do 5000 steps a day and have substituted my fitness efforts with 25 minute Focus T25 workouts (modified for the fact that I cannot do much jumping and some movements are not yet tolerated by my healing ankle) which get my heart rate up and achieve about 50% of that.
Last night’s bonus “dinner” was the most amazing baby mangos which was today’s snack treat. I have a veritable collection of fruit now that I’ll never be able to work my way through unless I eschew all other meals. I suspect they have mistaken me for the very hungry caterpillar 🐛 as I now have 3 bananas, 4 peaches, 5 mangoes and 7 apples … not to mention the growing collection of well known and obscure fizzy drinks – if you’re living next to me – I’m your secret Sinterklaas who’s leaving fizzy drinks on the chair next to your door each night.
Blanket D6
The beginning of the fruit mountain
I think the red one is sour prune by the picture
My time available to read for pleasure has also slowed to a crawl, although I did manage to finish “The Plot” by Jean Hanff Korelitz, which is a very satisfying clever thriller in a thriller, as a result of my neighbour’s 4.30am wake up noisy telephone calls. Now I need to go and order some of the PD books that were mentioned in the last two day’s PD because at least 1/2 of my job is still being a librarian.
Quarantine Day 5. This may seem strange to see but today I’ve spent quite a few moments laughing until I have tears in my eyes and I’m unable to speak coherently. The reason? My Shanghai Quarantine wechat group. Or as they call themselves Sha QuaranTEAM.
Never mind stoicism or resilience or being prepared for the worst – the most important thing is probably to be part of a community that knows how to laugh at themselves and make light of the situation. Our group is now nearly 400 members and each new person has to disclose the snack / food stash by means of a photo (the snack food cold war) and pledge their alliagance to one of three teams.
So far Team Cheetos seems to winning out – motto: Stay Home. Eat Cheetos. Be naked.
And so another sun sets on a day of work and meetings interspersed with belly laughter.
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.
21/22 rows done
worth reading
part of my exercise check list
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!
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
my tatty towel
my hitchhiker towel
jetlag progress
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.
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
View from window
bed with crochet project
Working space
For those of you not living in China and have expressed interest in the system here – you do not get to choose your hotel. You can also not book a flight directly to Beijing, but have to first quarantine in another city 14 days in isolation in a quarantine hotel and the 7 days in a hotel of your choice where you have more freedom of movement.
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.
Informative Flights - Musings of a Teacher Librarian 