Quarantine Diary Day 14: PCR Testing of Body...and Environment??
Yesterday afternoon, the medical staff who came by to ask for my temperature report also informed me that this morning, I’d be getting not only PCR testing on myself, but also my phone, water cup, and luggage.
Sure enough, this morning, starting around 5:30am, I heard the medical staff loudly setting up outside. Then at 6am, they started knocking on doors, conducting their tests. In the picture above, taken through my door’s peep hole, you might be able to make out two hazmat-suited, medical gown-covered staff entering the room across from me.
When they came to my room, one staff member had three swabs: one for each nostril, and one for the throat. I handed over my phone to the other staff, who also had three swabs. She took my phone into the bathroom, where she (I believe) swabbed it and my red plastic water cup. Then she came out to swab my duffel bag, because it was the first thing within reach.
Each of the six swabs was then put into their own, individual vial of pink reagent.
You can kind of see in this picture that she left behind big, wet footprints. I think they put disinfectant on their feet before entering the rooms, but they obviously don’t wait long enough for the disinfectant to dry. So they track dirt from room to room and from hallway to room.
It was quite gross, so I Lysol-ed the floor twice and then using my foot, wiped with one of my hand towels. The towel turned brown.
Later, I found out through my big WeChat group of people from my flight, that the PCR tests in their hotels were even more ridiculous. They had their door handles (understandable), pillows (because one drools in their sleep? one person asked…), toothbrushes (what would this accomplish vs. the throat swab?), even their walls and floors. Tell me, what part of the wall would you test, expecting something as tiny as the tip of a swab pick up? How much more extreme can this get?
Maybe the chef knew how stressful this was, so the breakfast was pretty good this morning. Especially after the mystery meat from last night, I was really looking forward to breakfast, because they are tend to feature stomach-calming, recognizable foods.
There was black rice congee, which was pretty hot today. I enjoyed it plain. I ate the egg with the zhacai (pickled mustard tuber) and Tabasco. And there were three beef and corn dumplings, which also went well with Tabasco. Though these were probably industrially produced, they were good.
There was also this “Danish Roll.” The package says “Warming it up makes it taste even better,” and indeed this was served warm. I had been planning on making a sandwich out of it, with the egg and zhacai in the middle, but whenI tasted it, it was actually quite sweet. So I ate it on its own, like a sweet, buttery dessert, dipping some pieces into coffee.
By the way, this is how meals show up. The meals are placed on a plastic stool outside the door by the deliver person. One delivery person is good at yelling to everyone that the meal has arrived, but sometimes they delivery them and no one says anything, so you kind of have to listen for them. You can see how the doors, stools, and everything are streaked and caked with dried up disinfectant. And sometimes this dried up disinfectant gets attached to the underside of the bag of food due to condensation, and gets redeposited on the desk when I put it down. And then I have to wipe down the desk again.
My mom noted that the rug looks like it is stained with mold. It certainly looks that way, but I think that’s part of the design, because I see it like that in the hotel’s publicity photos.
Lunch was actually pretty good. One thing is that it came with a juicy, filling apple.
I was excited that we got spinach! Just plain spinach. Of course, it’s the easiest vegetable to overcook, and there was no exception to the string of overcooked vegetables in our meals, but I still really appreciated the vegetables.
There was also a piece of fish that was perfectly cut to the size of the container. It was very tender, and boneless, which I liked. It was a bit too salty (with MSG?) though, but a lot of rice and pepper from my Residence Inn salt and pepper shakers helped things along.
Cauliflower was overcooked as always.
The beef and peppers wasn’t bad: beef was easily chewable, and the peppers had a surprising crunch to them!
It was a really nice day outside, as seen through my dusty windows. Since it was a weekend, I took the afternoon to take a nap (since I got little sleep last night with the early morning PCR tests). I also finished up “The Power of the Dog,” which I had started in San Diego, and then watched the documentary “Downfall, the Case Against Boeing,” both on Netflix.
I also had afternoon tea, or coffee rather. I mixed half a capsule of instant coffee with a tiny bit of cold water to make a strong espresso-strength coffee in a travel tea set my sister gave me.
It was yummy to dip the very sweet and buttery Bimbo “Hong Kong style egg waffle” into the bitter coffee! Kind of like a tiramisu. Also had a Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Mint Cream, which I have really enjoyed throughout this quarantine.
Dinner, by contrast, was a big disappointment.
Normal vegetables.
The squid rings were kind of scary, because there were so many ingredients. Peppers, and some kind of salted vegetable?
Shredded potato and pork was ok, though a bit salty with MSG. This is actually one dish I don’t mind a bit overcooked, because I like the mealy texture of potato, rather than the crispy rawness which is how shredded potato usually is in Chinese cuisine.
The scary part was this last section. When I was opening up the plastic bag, I thought I smelled tomato, and was expecting tomato with egg, a classic Chinese dish. Then through the plastic lid, I saw a whole section of red, and so I thought maybe they just gave us big chunks of tomato (which would have been nice too). But then upon opening the box up, I saw that it was actually a lurid red piece of pork!
It jut looked so unnaturally red. And the meat inside was grey. So I tasted a teensy tiny bit, but did not dare to eat this. What if they were disguising bad meat with this fluorescent color?
I went over to my flight’s spinoff WeChat group for this hotel, and funnily enough, someone commented, “今天拿块腐乳肉的颜色也很可怕，而其上面还有猪毛。“ People had just been commenting on the horribly artificial, spongy “bacon” from several days ago, and this person said, “Today’s piece of fermented tofu pork (I didn’t know this was what the flavor was) has a scary color, plus there are still pig hairs on top.” Indeed, as I look at this picture again, there are hairs sticking out of the skin on the right side!
