Tag: Shanghai

Quarantine +7 Day 2

Today was one of those days. I’d walked past a recommended clinic on Thursday to check where to have my D16 covid test and was referred to a local hospital. So I left nice and early at 7am to get it done before work. It was walking distance so I was keen to get a few steps in.

Then the comedy of errors began. I went to the test prefab (they’re all in prefabs not in the main hospital), no I needed a red card, I had to go and register. Then for the next hour I went up and down stairs – up to pay – no you need to go down to get a slip of paper first, down to 1st floor to get the paper, then up to register, then down to get a red card, then up to pay, then down to get a code. Now this all seems fairly straight forward except people in Shanghai (let’s not generalise and just say, people in Shanghai at that hospital early in the morning) are incredibly rude and pushy but the standards I’ve become used to in Beijing. Queues are non-existent – there is the illusion of them but people just butt in and stand in front of you! Even if you’re at the front of the queue, talking to someone, and they have your papers and passport in front of them, someone else will come up from the side, push their papers on top of yours and talk over you. And this didn’t just happen once – it happened the whole time. Fierce stare and strong “对不起！got more than adequate practice. So then feeling a tiny big smug having navigated all of that, off I went back outside to the prefab. They took my red card, gave me a QR code for the test and I sat down on the testing chair. She got the nose pricker ready. Looked at my card, looked and my passport and said – “no, you go”. Go where? – “go back inside for testing”. So I went back inside, back into virtual queues, found someone who found someone else who told me the hospital didn’t test people like me on their D16 test. So back to the rigamarole to get reimbursed because they weren’t going to let me leave without getting my Y80 back. So, where to go? You must go to xxx hospital. It was also walking distances, so off I went. Luckily they didn’t even let me join the queue and said they didn’t test my type at that hospital.

At which point, I contacted a colleague who’d had a test done at a place 30 minutes away from where I was, and got the details and hopped into a didi. Joined a huge queue and practiced my newly acquired Shanghai skills by jumping the queue, not immensely, just about 1/3 closer to the entry than I should have. No-one complained. Another hour later (all the while, as I’m at T+2 hours, in a meeting that had begun learning about child safety on my phone) I was tested with the most gentle possible way. In fact the most gentle test I’ve had since this escapade began.

The other thing I’ve noticed – they’ve eliminated walking space on the pavements here – they’re all taken up by bicycles and motorbikes. That’s all well and good if you’re fairly even-footed and nimble – but outside a hospital it’s pure chaos as people on crutches and in wheelchairs are incapable of getting from point A to B without considerable assistance, and then at a very slow pace. And there is construction everywhere. Really everywhere.

The whole testing thing took a total of nearly 4 hours! Luckily I could attend my training virtually.

The rest of the day was pretty busy with start of year stuff and in the evening I walked to dinner with a bunch of people I’d never met. That is one nice thing about social media and friends of friends. I’d gotten in contact with an ex-Beijing member of our knitting group who now lives in Shanghai, and she invited me to dinner with 14 other people. It was a 40 minute walk from my hotel, and as you all have guessed if there’s one thing I need to do, it’s get some steps outside in.

I had a great walk through the neighbourhood, stumbled on a “hole in the wall” place that gave me a fantastic foot massage, and my first experience of hearing 上海话。Something I’d learnt about in one of the chapters of my first chinese text book 16 years. It was literally a case of 听不懂。But a good opportunity to practice my chinese asking the masseuse if it was 上海话 and that’s the reason I didn’t understand anything. Foot massage is WAY cheaper here at Y70 for an hour, as opposed to the Y120++ in Beijing. And she gave a great one.

Dinner was fun, meeting a bunch of young people with some interesting stories, including one with the most fabulous steam punk tattoos (tempting!), and a passion for climbing volcanoes in the area which is currently on hold due to you know what. Did you know China has volcanoes?

So Shanghai started to redeem itself. We’ll see today and tomorrow when I actually have some time (even if I could / should do more work I’m talking the weekend off) to walk around and enjoy.

Quarantine D14

Let loose today and made the 80 minute trek across town to my new +7 location. It’s great to be free – went for a nice long walk, and a meal with fresh salad!

Even though I really appreciate being able to be “outside” and have some choice in my meals, the whole quarantine experience wasn’t too bad. There’s something to be said about having and extremely simple life – few choices, highly structured and very productive.

There is the apocryphal story of Victor Hugo throwing all his clothes out the window to prevent himself from going out and being distracted so that he could complete the Hunchback of Notre Dame. It appears it was just his formal clothes and they were locked in a cupboard. Nevertheless, I remember also last year when my son and I were both in quarantine for the first time, emerging into the apocalyptic scenario where we were the only living beings in the hotel, making our way to the airport and flying home and then for a few weeks after, he kept on remarking on how overwhelming the world was, and how little one actually needs in life.

I’ve had firm admonishments from my colleagues following my journey to “seize the day” and have fun exploring Shanghai over the weekend and not working! It is in fact probably more than 20 years since I’ve been in Shanghai, so I plan to do just that.

We had our last day of the ECIS middle leadership course today, and were introduced to the work of Susan Craig Scott and Fierce Conversations and Kim Scott (the coincidence of a same surname?!) and Radical Candor. Very interesting and had a good conversation in our breakout room on how culturally transferable it would be. After 19 years in Asia I’m always cognoscente on people losing face. I’ll read the books and see where they take me.

Quarantine D13

Tonight is my last night in the wonderful “Home Inn”. So this morning I had the infamous double dipping covid test. For some reason we now have to have two separate complete oral and nasal covid tests that are submitted to two separate testing agencies – so it was double the discomfort. Does on ever get used to these tests?

Today was super busy at work, in fact I’ve just finished off now. Fresh tomatoes made their appearance both at lunch and as my dinner “fruit”. Heaven knows how much the people here think one small person is capable of consuming per day!

Related to yesterday’s post, listened to a wonderful podcast episode over lunch by Tara Bruch “Good Othering” definitely worth listening in the light of the idea of additive parenting and being.

And this daily blogging is exhausting! Wish I’d undertaken it during the break and not school time!

I came across this meme today. I’ve kind of wasted the day a bit – scrolling through 100s of memes on one of my librarian networks, having an afternoon nap – somehow the last week seems to have caught up with me with a bit too little sleep and quite a lot of work.

I found this funny in a way, it expresses the last year for some people quite well, but when I looked again, I realised it wasn’t really my reality. I had to laugh at the last “step” because in my case it was a step down, and ended up being more significant than a lot of the stuff that had gone before…

But I don’t think I over-reacted – when I broke my ankle it was more a sense of resignation and “let’s get on with this, how can I continue to be high functioning while sitting with my leg stretched out in front of me for 2 months.”

I’ve had this conversation with quite a few people in the last months / year. I don’t really like revisiting past traumas and difficulties. Before I had children I went through some pretty intensive counselling to deal with my “stuff” which cleared most of it out, and then doing some MBSR, meditation and the 10 day silent retreat took most of the rest of the load off. Not to say that some things and people are not still pretty triggering, but it’s not the huge rock it could be. And then I will acknowledge my privilege and say the pandemic has been crappy, but not as crappy as it could have been. Part of that due to being able to ride most of it out in Switzerland for the first half of 2020 with my son, and part that the rest was in China where it was pretty much a non-event for the majority of the 20-21 school year. I still didn’t see my husband for 7 months, and I’m now going into 13 months since I last saw my daughter.

The thing is, and this may be controversial, but I don’t really like revisiting and re-picking over the past that much. I don’t think it’s denial. I liken it to when you’ve scraped your knee really badly as a kid and you have a huge (in your mind) wound that then scabs over. If you disinfect and treat it and leave it to heal, it generally is fine, and leaves a bit of a scar as a reminder. But if you keep picking at the scab, it keeps re-opening and bleeding and may reinfect and then you have a mess on your hands. I feel sometimes that’s what we’re doing with the last year. I’m ready to move on but a lot of rumination and picking at the scab goes on around me. And I don’t quite know, and can’t always politely extract myself from the conversations. I think we also do too much of that with kids, and I’m not sure it’s that healthy for teenagers to ruminate rather than find constructive things to do. Do you think that’s just avoidance?

There is that Buddhist concept of the “second sword” – a warrior gets stabbed by a sword and gets injured but recovers. But then keeps ruminating and remembering the incident – they liken it with then creating new self-inflicted sword wounds on oneself.

The mystery meat has been replaced by suspicious fish in the last two days – they take up a lot of space but are mainly bone and skin and other fish parts. The crochet blanket is at about 1/3 progress and the fruit supply is now at a count of:

• 7 bananas
• 18 apples
• 5 peaches
• 5 pears
• 3 mangos

Getting mangos is about as close as I can get to hitting the fruit jackpot these days – they’re delicious and the perfect sweet snack. Know what I’d really like right now – a nice big juicy butter avocado – like the ones you can only find in South Africa.

Now I need to continue my Adobe Illustrator course – it’s pretty good – on lesson 11/23. I have the video going on my iPad while I try out the stuff on my laptop – can anyone tell me why Adobe doesn’t use CMD to multiple select like every other Mac programme?

Quarantine D10

I’ve kind of lost track of time and wasn’t sure which day it was today – 4 more days to go! Weekends are a bit harder since there isn’t the structure of work, but I ended up working all day anyway. Since the beginning of the year I’ve been working on revamping all our Libguides to a new look and feel under Learn.wab.edu. Finally libguides will be used further afield than just the library, and it will be our one-stop-shop for content management and knowledge management.

The other amazing part of the equation is that through making the guides now for all subjects and units, I’m getting to work with departments and teachers who in the past wouldn’t naturally navigate to the library. So today I started putting the templates in place for Music, Art and Drama and PHE. After sitting at the computer for way too long, I managed to get a work-out in – the ankle is steadily accepting more work.

For some reason staying in quarantine really brings up all sorts of quotes from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – one of my all time favourite books, and one where so many quotes have stuck in my head.

Today the quarantinis were comparing unidentifiable lying pieces of meat, and I had to think of the quote where Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser, the computer-based drinks machine onboard the Heart of Gold is said to produce something “almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea”. My fish, in contrast was identifiable, and I think the strips of stuff is tofu. It’s difficult to quantify exactly how insanely boring food and eating has become. Most of the time I’m just picking at what’s served and feeling slight nauseous. My fruit stash is still increasing by 7 and decreasing by 2 each day.

Quarantine D9

The NZ crowd outside the country are in a bit of a tizzy about the MIQ situation. All quarantines are not created equally and not all countries with quarantine have uniform policies by any stretch of the imagination. My hotel isn’t great but at least it’s not a repurposed youth camp or some other facility like some of my colleagues were stuck in last year. The fact of the matter is that if a country decides to go the quarantine route, they really do need to make sure there are enough facilities available.

But then comes the question as to what is suitable. As you can read from this article New Zealanders have pretty high expectations of their facilities including help with their mental health during the 2 week stay. Now I know quite a few people from NZ and to a person they’re all pretty resilient folk given to climbing mountains, trail running and all sorts of rugged activity, so the article rather surprises me. Personally I think MIQ sounds pretty cushy compared to Quarantine here in China. They even get to walk around, access to care packages from friends, and a bottle of wine per day!

Judging by other friends in quarantine in various countries at the very least they seem to be able to choose the type and price point of the hotel they’ll be staying in. One of the most frequently asked question in our quarantine group as people get ready to arrive is how to “game” the system – primarily to avoid the Vienna Hotel (which seems to be the current contender for bottom of the pile). As far as I can tell, there are 3 groups of people in the “sorting hat” of the airport:

• those destined for Shanghai – in which case they turn left and get allocated according to their district. Now rumour has it that they don’t actually check that you live in Shanghai, just check that it’s a valid address – I don’t know if it’s worth risking
• those who are “special” usually they’re already marked as special in the plane and they’ve pre-arranged their specialness and are called out before others disembark, are guided through the testing process and whisked out of a different gate – from my plane it seems that they may have been diplomatic types and one couple had a young baby (and perhaps also diplomatic)
• The rest of us. We’re just herded into pens according to our final destination and they seem to have a very special place in hell for those destined for Beijing for some reason.

So what to do? I kind of wish I’d still been on crutches or a wheelchair on the route back because that may have made me special. It seems some people in nicer hotels had special dietary needs which may mean their needs could only be met by a higher class hotel – who knows. If you find a formula, I’m sure there are a lot of people who’d like to be informed.

It’s Friday, so I decided to do a bit of cleaning – since vacuum cleaners are rather scarce on the ground in my hotel, used a bunch of dettol wipes to do the floor – there’s something a little disconcerting finding dark straight black hairs when you have brown curly hair, and toenails that you didn’t clip when doing this exercise! I also found a bug – it was dead, but one wonders. And then I made my grains and quinoa mix for lunch instead of the white rice which I’m getting really really tired of. I miss Southern and Northern food – am craving noodles and dumplings right now.

The blanket is growing slowly – too much work work and no time for crocheting!

D8 Quarantine

More adventures from the Quarantini’s.

I’ve had quite a busy day today and doing an Adobe Illustrator course was still on my “to do” list from the vacation and since I got a 24 hour expiring special offer to do a course via LinkedIn, I decided that now was the time to try and find 5 hours in the next 24 hours to do it. Maybe stupid?

Anyway, I then took a stretch break and glanced at the quarantine Wechat group and found 189 unread messages, and the following story unfolded. It’s a story worthy of making a modern-day spin-off of Fawlty Towers and relocating it to an anonymous (to protect my sources) hotel in Shanghai. It’s also a story that had my spirits up and tear ducts getting a work out from crying with laughter.

Although I’m not much of a drinker following a mis-spent youth and pregnancies and breastfeeding, many of my fellow Quarantinis like to imbibe. And there is a kind of cat and mouse game between the inmates and the captors in just about every quarantine hotel. It seems the purveyors of food and drink are firmly on the side of the inmates, with items being smuggled in otherwise innocuous items or packaged for camouflage, but today’s escapades totally take the cake.

Inmate 1 (I1)seems to be one of those fully prepared types with something for all eventualities, from his own exercise bicycle to the equipment to jerry-rig any situation. I suspect it’s also not his first round at the rodeo of quarantine. He also has the “goods” in terms of beverages. Inmate 2 (I2) is a Q novice but seems to be up for a bit of fun and some liquid refreshment. Critical to the mission, they share a hotel, but reside on different floors.

So over the course of a couple of hours, I1 contrived to get an industrial vacuum cleaner delivered to his room to “vacuum some broken glass”. The insides were then supplemented with some packaged beverages and put back outside his room. At which point I2 contacted housekeeping with his “problematic mess”. And got delivered a vacuum cleaner. The wrong one! Then he contrived to convince housekeeping that that particular vacuum cleaner was 不好 and his needs could only be met with the high powered great vacuum that his mate in room ### had been using.

His wish was their command, and the 好 vacuum duly made its way up to his room with the package intact and has been received.

I don’t know how I’m going to survive back in normal life without the juvenile antics to keep me amused.

Meanwhile, I’ve been given anti-biotic drops for my eyes and a stern warning that they’re not to eat, and my stockpile of apples continue to grow. If I can get anywhere near the hotel of I1 & I2 I’m sure they’d organise an oven, mixing bowls and other ingredients to make apple pie that we could distribute by drone to the other 402 members of the group.

I’ll not include any pictures of the escapades above – don’t want to prevent it’s future success so here are some alternatives.

D7 quarantine

We’re at the half way mark. I’m not saying much today – it’s been super busy with the first day back for all faculty and staff and juggling lots of online meetings and presentations. Had my 7 day covid-test – literally feels like a roto-roota went through my nasal cavities. Maybe because I did not use my tissue to masturbate my nose before-hand as instructed – I was in the middle of a meeting so I didn’t think that was appropriate. They are NOT kind or gentle.

I seem to have picked up some kind of eye infection (the irony), at least it’s not covid – because I got my “unquarantine” notice today.

Make sure the parade and marching band are ready on time! I’m off for an early night with eyes shut and no more screen time.