Shanghai Hotel Quarantine Diary: Day 14, Release Day!
5:37am - first time wearing shoes in two weeks! I’ve been in slippers this whole time. Final early morning view out the window.
5:59am - they said they’d call around 6am, and lo and behold, just one minute before I received the call. It’s time to go downstairs! Goodbye room!
Wow, I can enter the hallway and look all the way down. It was also strange to get into the elevator WITH OTHER PEOPLE in it. By chance, I’m in the elevator with a Japanese businessman who came on the bus with me on arrival, and whom I helped a bit explaining and translating some of the instructions. I had told him in the beginning that I should be in for just 7 days, with 7 days at home, so he expressed surprise in seeing me. I explained that I was rejected for the home quarantine.
They said check-out would be fast, and indeed it was. They had a list of people checking out, and we were compared against that list three times. Once just outside the elevator, then once where they gave us our release certificate, negative COVID test certificate, and receipts. And then at the door, we showed these papers to the guard and they crossed us off another list. The staff and guards were very friendly and helped me with my bags. I came in with two suitcases, backpack, and messenger bag, and left with all of them plus three more shopping bags because of all of the snacks and water from my care packages.
It kind of seemed like the only people there were people from my bus? I thought that there would have been more people who arrived that same day. I recognized some people, like the girl with a guitar strapped on her back, the Japanese businessman…
You can see this entrance was well-guarded. I think the hotel had a different entrance that looked more “normal”? I asked though if there were photocopying services there, and they said that since the whole hotel had been turned into a quarantine hotel, there weren’t such services.
6:16am - I called a Didi for the first time since January, and went to my apartment. I almost forgot the address of the secondary entrance (not my street address), and where it was on the street!
6:38am - I went up the stairs, turned to the door, and breathed a sigh of relief. It didn’t look like anyone jimmied the lock or broke down the door. I opened the door, and things looked (and smelled) pretty normal.
But wait, why is that white trashcan in my bedroom tipped over? How could it have fallen over all by itself?
I looked to the left, and couldn’t really make out something on the ground, but it didn’t look normal. I turned on the light, and there was a dead rat in my bathroom! It had decomposed and left hairs all around it, not to mention poop all around the bathroom. It looked it like was really running around, knocking over the toilet brush, and toilet itself was filthy (you can’t really tell in this picture, because the white is shiny and overexposed). I think it came out through the drainage, because both the drain covers, one in the shower and one you can see below on the left, were displaced.
So while there wasn’t an intruder through the front door, there was a furry, dirty one through the drain.
The rat was completely flattened and dried out.
I ordered a cleaning and disinfecting service to come in as soon as possible, but I figured I couldn’t wait four hours for them to come. I used the two bath mats to kind of lift it off the floor, rolled up the bathmats (one had poop all around the bottom of it, and threw it away.
I wasn’t expecting a rat and rat poop (which I also found on my bed, and in the kitchen). But I was expecting a lot more mold. I was thinking I’d walk in and see a kind of Savannah Spanish moss type of effect with mold dripping down the ceilings and walls.
There was mold, but I found them principally on my wool garments. Not wool-silk blends, or wool-cotton. Just the wool ones.
Also my wool and Panama hats, which then affected the things underneath. The mold might be able to be washed away from the wool items, but I’m not so sure if the Panama hats can be rescued.
12:30pm - the cleaners finally came. I ordered bathroom cleaning and disinfecting at 11:30am, and the mattress and sofa steam clean at 12:30pm. The cleaning service called me to tell me that the services would be combined at 12:30pm. So they came, and poor girls did the bathroom (I only removed a small fraction of the poop in there, besides the rat), the mattress, and the sofa, and while they were here with their steam machine, I asked them to clean the fridge and freezer too. The fridge looked perfectly clean, but oddly enough it was the freezer that had mold around the seal and door.
4:30pm - Yesterday, I also arranged for the Ayi (housekeeper) of one of my friends to come and clean. That was before I knew there was a dead rat problem, and didn’t want to confront her with that problem since she’d probably not have the right equipment. She still had plenty to do, helping me with laundry, and cleaning everything over once again, including the already disinfected bathroom. It really gave me peace of mind.
8:30pm - After lots of work calls, and only a couple nut bars throughout the day, I finally make it outside of the apartment to eat my first meal. How strange it is to eat in a restaurant! With other people! Not wearing masks!
I chose the dumpling place down the street. One of the places I’d thought about while in the US, and the last place I ate with my family when they came to visit almost a year ago.
I ordered ten pork and Chinese celery dumplings (18 RMB), my favorite!
Then back “home,” I could finish some things up, and went to bed on the sofa. The mattress was still drying, and I had yet to wash the mattress cover, so Ayi made up my bed on the sofa. How nice it is to have an Ayi!
So looking back, I realize it was truly a blessing in disguise that I was rejected for home quarantine. I’d previously talked about the reasons why I was grateful for hotel quarantine, while I was still in quarantine: three meals delivered daily to the doorstep, no need to cook, no need to think about ordering food, no need to decide what to make or order, no need to decide when to eat. Also, no obligations to do any errands, to obligation to take part in any activities, and being forced to stay inside, which protected me from very severe outside pollution.
Well, there was one more, BIG, positive: not having to face cleaning a whole apartment, not to mention a dead rat and all of its hair and prolific poop, by myself, locked up, with the ability to throw things away only once a day. That truly would have been a traumatic experience, to be living with this thing and among its mess, knowing it ran around my bed. I didn’t even feel comfortable sitting on the toilet until the disinfecting people came, because it was so dirty.
So now, after several cleanings, I feel like the apartment is more like home. And that’s something that could only have been achieved with the help of other people.
