Hopkins in Quarantine Day 10

By Tom

Still here, still alive, still bored. We have gotten an actual release date and time now, 9 am on Saturday. Took a bit of prodding to get an actual time though. To be honest I thought we wouldn’t be getting out until Sunday at around 5am as that is the time that we arrived at our apartment. Maybe they are starting the clock from when we landed in China? But wait that was at 7pm on Saturday. Maybe it doesn’t really follow any particular system of logic.

I have really been struggling to write lately, primarily because of how lethargic/out of it I have felt over the past few days. Maybe it’s just because I have no way to really burn energy but I’m finding myself struggling to sleep lately. Been going to sleep around 9:00pm and waking up at 1:30am and finding it nearly impossible to get back to sleep.

Hector has finally started to have online classes. These are interesting but I feel like me and Katy are getting more out of them than he is, despite being back in China for nearly two weeks now we have heard decidedly very little Chinese. Hector on the other hand seemed excited/happy to see some of his teachers from nursery again, but he doesn’t seem to find their talking heads interesting enough to hold his interest. Lately Hector seems to be growing more restless too, he hasn’t really made an effort to escape the apartment, but he does seem to keep trying to go on the balcony/is throwing things a lot more. Hopefully he’s feeling better/less aggressive in a few days when we’re finally let out of here.

I am finding world news progressively harder to pay attention to/care about. Katy’s definitely sticking to it more closely than me. I can tell just because once every two to four hours she’ll come to me with an aghast expression drawn across her face and state something along the lines of; “How can Trump be such a monster.” “Can you believe this?” At this point it feels more like a form of crude entertainment, predictable entertainment. I mean, being shocked/horrified/aghast at anything these people do now seems like being shocked at water’s ongoing insistence on being wet. Katy asked me this morning, how many people do I suspect will need to die in the States before people actively start blaming Trump/holding him accountable. I’d put a low-ball figure at around 50,000. Although I suspect it would need to be considerably higher than that.

On the bright side things here in China are getting much closer to normalcy again. Most of the bars are open and putting on great specials to encourage people to come back out. I’m just hoping by the time Shanghai Disneyland opens again I’ll actually be able to travel outside of Hangzhou and back without being put into a quarantine again! As for our work, it looks like we may be opening again soon! NO official-official word on it, but they asked the parents to fill out a medical report for their kids stating that the local government will require all parents to have done such a thing 2 weeks before the school reopens. Could mean we’ll see the school reopening in two and a half weeks! I hope so, online teaching really isn’t the same as teaching in a classroom.

Sorry this is a bit of a downer blog post, just feel like I’m running out of things to post/write about. Or maybe I’m just feeling too tired.