Shanghai Hotel Quarantine Diary: Day 3
7:45am - breakfast placed outside door
7:55am - pick up breakfast. First do Centr app workout, then wash up, and then eat.
Today’s breakfast is so pretty!
The 地瓜, or sweet potato, turned out to be a purple sweet potato! Then there was the usual daily hardboiled egg (白煮鸡蛋).
A most interesting part of the breakfast was the molasses/brown sugar cake (红糖松糕). I checked a recipe online, and it only had 4 ingredients: molasses, rice flour, glutinous rice flour, and water. It was chewy, which is understandable due to the glutinous rice flour, but spongy with air holes at the same time. Yet no yeast or baking soda! This was really tasty.
The spring rolls had vegetables in them - maybe cabbage, carrot, and bamboo shoot? There are three things in them, based on the name 三丝春卷. I perked them up a bit (along with the egg) with my bottle of Tapatío hot sauce, that I bought all the way back in March to bring back to Shanghai.
Then there was the yogurt (酸奶). Two days ago they didn’t provide a spoon when they served yogurt, which I thought could be a mistake. But it was no fluke - today they didn’t provide a spoon either. I wonder how other people eat yogurt? Thankfully, I had a spoon (thanks United! and thanks for the napkin/placemat as well…)
7:24am - hotel calls to tell us we can pick up our breakfasts. Thankfully I didn’t wait around for their call to do so.
8:45am - temperature check
9:45am - trash collection and “disinfection.” It’s really randomly spraying at a few things with a spray bottle. I would actually prefer a system where they just give us a big trash bag and we leave it outside. That way no one has to come into our rooms. Safer for the workers too! Here’s the cleaner leaving, with his spray bottle.
11:40am - lunch is left out
11:55am - they call to tell us we can pick up lunch.
Today there were a couple star ingredients. One was the “white boiled shrimp” (白灼虾 bai2zhuo2xia1). I got 3 shrimp! They were plain but tasty all on their own.
Then there was the marinated duck drumstick, 卤水鸭腿肉. This was flavorful and flake apart tender.
炒云南小瓜, or stir-fried Yunnan squash sounded exotic, but turned out to be basically zucchini. So while it was more pedestrian than expected, there was a good quantity of it and I appreciated the veggies.
The ground meat vermicelli (肉末粉丝) was okay… The ground meat was basically tiny rubbery nubs.
The mushroom soup (菌菇汤 jun1gu1tang1) was surprisingly refreshing. In fact, it really seemed like just water with a little salt, flavored with the mushrooms just sitting in the water. These clear soups that they’ve been serving have all been visually beautiful in my opinion.
2:00pm - a little nap time
2:39pm - temperature check. Once again, thank goodness I had my instant read digital thermometer, because I forgot they were coming around again.
5:37pm - dinner dropped off
5:50pm - picked up dinner. Watched Modern Love episode 2 over dinner.
On the menu it says 清炒小塘菜, and I wasn’t sure if “小塘菜” was mustard green or “small pond vegetable?” Well, it turned out to be ho-hum bok choy. Not complaining though, it was crisp and refreshing, a good contrast to the other dishes which were all strongly flavored today. Also notice that today’s rice is in the bigger section - because more was definitely needed.
One of the strongly flavored dishes was the chicken feet (港式蒸凤爪)!
The mapo tofu (川式麻婆豆腐) was more saucy than I like, but it was surprisingly spicy, and also had the numbing Sichuan peppercorns in there.
A discover was the red-braised 红烧笋衣, and I’m not sure what “笋衣” is. Literally, it sounds like it’s a part that surrounds the bamboo shoot, and indeed this part of the bamboo was thin and ribbony, yet had a firm crunch to it. I love being able to try new dishes!
And then there was the 番茄榨菜蛋花汤, tomato and pickled mustard egg drop soup. Once again, the soup part was very light, basically a refreshing flavored water.
6:21pm - received the call to pick up dinner. I can’t fault them for taking so long to call people, I mean, what a hard job it is to phone every guest room at the same time to tell them that dinner is ready.
6:40pm - chatted with friend from Spain, and showed him my quarantine digs.
