Hi everyone, believe it or not I actually have a bunch of drafted blog posts concerning our travels recently. However, I thought people would be more immediately interested in the 14 day quarantine period me and the family are going through in China.
As most of you are no doubt aware Coronavirus or Covid19 has become all the rage lately. The upsurge of cases in China began a week after we had started a trip to Vietnam/Cambodia. Our school went into closed-mode and the holidays were extended. Then they were extended again….and then again. Infact the holidays are still going now! Of course this hasn’t really been an ongoing holiday as students have had online classes and me and Katy have had to teach said online classes. Probably could write a whole blog post about that as well, but actually lets just focus on what’s going on at the moment.
We returned to Hangzhou from Canada after being away for nearly 2 months. As we were arriving from a country with a rising number of cases we found ourselves given a yellow sticker which designates that we must be quarantined at home (thankfully) for 14 days. This ain’t any weak-sauce Italian or American self-isolation either. We are not allowed to leave our apartment room, not even to put out garbage. Still it seems better than spending 2 weeks in a hotel room, which was the alternative. Although atleast our food would be easier to get as the hotel would be serving three meals a day. As it stands we are going to have to survive off of Meituan and other delivery apps and the good will of our building supervisor.
We left Toronto at 4:25pm and arrived in Hangzhou at 5:50pm, the following day. Time changes are fun, but all in all we were in the air for just over 13 hours. What came next was expected but no less un-fun. We had to go through multiple checks, get a yellow sticker applied to our passport, no doubt dissapoint the school driver sent to collect us (He couldn’t due to yellow sticker). We were through security and with our bags just before 10pm. We then entered a waiting room for our province which, was…well it was a room. You could wait in. Well actually it was a section of airport cordoned off by plastic walls. This meant no water, or toliets…unless of course you nagged one of the no doubt over-worked workers in the hazmat suits. They let me out to use a toilet temporarily.
At around midnight a bus arrived to take us to our province or rather a rather central part of the province. At this point it was about 2:30 am. The holding area was a parking lot with a Road and Transport office located across from it. Checking Baidu maps it was effectively in the middle of nowhere. Here we were checked again, screened and then sent to wait for a bus to take us to our city. Around 4:00am we arrived in Hangzhou where we stopped infront of one of the dreaded Hotel Quarantines. These are actually just normal hotels, with decent accommodation and where you end up if you don’t have a permanent residence particularly close to the airport you landed in. It would have sucked to be in one, but it would probably have been bearable if not for Hector. We really wanted to get home to where his toys were and where he’d have at least a few rooms to run around in as our apartment has about…hrm lets see….3 bedrooms, living room, dining room, two bathrooms….so about 5 more rooms than an average hotel in China? We still are not sure how he is going to cope with being isolated in here for so long.
Finally after about 10 hours of screening, transferring, waiting for buses, riding buses. We arrived home at 4:45am. to find…very rotten bananas…damnit. Today hasn’t been particularly exciting. Hangzhou has been in lock down in some shape or form for nearly two months now, so not much new construction has been evident. One very notable change is how far we can see from our 31st window. We’ve had clear days before, but nothing like this. You can see multiple layers of mountains and everything is so incredibly…not hazy. Goes to show how clean and beautiful this city could be in a few years if the Hangzhou government keeps pushing to introduce more and more public transport and more and more electric vehicles. I will be sure to take some pictures tomorrow morning when the suns out again and post them on day two of the blog.
So what else happened on Day One hrmmm…Katy and Hector went to sleep, so did I for about 4 hours. Woke up and decided to get grocery shopping done and figure out how we get groceries up here. Which was successful. It did get me wondering how other countries are going to handle long term quarantine if delivery isn’t so much an option.
In the evening we ordered Pizza but something went wrong and it ended up being delivered to the wrong building. When it finally arrived it was cold so naturally I put it into the oven. Which I had forgot how to operate properly. This was the result:
It tasted just a about as bad as it looked. That’s about all I’ve got to post for today. Check back tomorrow for the next update!
The Hopkins of Hangzhou 