Quarantine Diary Day 15: The Worst Day Yet

The day started off innocuously. I knew I’d be leaving this “red code” quarantine hotel of the first 14 days, for a “yellow code” quarantine hotel for my last 7 days. Basically the red code is the health code you have upon coming back from overseas, and you spend the first 14 days in a quarantine hotel with strict protocols like treating all of your trash as biohazard waste. Then the last 7 days one can technically spend at home, but after an incident in January when a person turned positive on the 21st day, and had infected a few others in a boba store, communities across Shanghai got scared. So they are telling residents that the last 7 days must be spent in a hotel as well.

Previously, you could book your own hotel. But now, with so many people being told they need to stay at a hotel for the last 7 days, we are sent to dedicated “yellow code” hotels, where all of the guests have yellow codes. It’s like the first quarantine hotel, but they have slightly less stringent policies, like not all of the staff wear hazmat suits.

So this morning I ate my breakfast in calm, knowing it was my last day. The breakfast today was seemed particularly meager. Just an egg, sausage,…

…the vegetable bun which always had such little filling…

…and what seemed like a 马拉糕, malagao (brown sugar rice cake), which I was introduced to for the first time at the Jianguo Hotel during my 2020 quarantine.

This was much more dry than I remembered the Jianguo version being.

I then happily did my weekly Zoom call with my family, and we ended the call when I heard the lunch delivery lady yell “饭来了！饭来了！“ Lunch is here! Lunch is here!

Today’s lunch was not bad. The orange was juicy and sweet as always. You can see below that I didn’t fully finish packing, because I knew I wanted my condiments and spices for lunch.

The chicken was a bit dried out, but tasty with chili peppers (and MSG, I believe).

There was a kind of gloopy dish with what I think was pork and mushrooms.

The shrimp were fairly big and moist. I think when they boil the shrimp, it comes out well. When they fry the shrimp, they were always dry and shriveled up.

Cabbage and carrots were limp as always.

After lunch, I finished packing my things. still not heard anything from the hotel about when we were leaving. The only thing the hotel said, when I asked, was to wait to be contacted.

At least it was a sunny day outside my dirty window…

Here was all of the trash left over. The two big boxes were 40L of water my office sent over!

Then at around 5:40pm, a member of my flight’s WeChat group told us that the front desk had told him we’d be leaving as late as 11pm!

Previously, it was shared that the front desk said 69 people were checking out today. (And only 2 people got approval for home quarantine. Well, 3 people in our group got approval, but 2 of them live together, so perhaps the front desk meant 2 parties got approval.)

The reason why it was going to take so long, was that each person was called individually to leave their room, go into the elevator by themselves, and go downstairs, and after each person went, someone would disinfect the hallways and elevator supposedly.

So time kept ticking, and the hotel didn’t say anything to me. This was the worst feeling: not having a clue with where we were heading next, let alone when! The feeling of lacking any sort of orientation or agency about what you were going to do the next minute. And not only that, other people in my group reported that their health code already turned yellow, which is what’s supposed to happen, but my code was still red! Constant refreshing did not change it to yellow, either.

We got dinner served at close to 8pm, which reconfirmed that really we could be leaving as late as 11pm.

The strawberry flavored yogurt was a new feature, replacing the more regular plain yogurt at dinner time.

The braised beef was kind of special. The potato cubes in there were sweet potato.

The cabbage and black fungus scramble was the usual soft vegetables with egg.

I enjoyed this dish: spongy gluten puffs with shiitake mushrooms. A quite flavorful vegetarian dish, with interesting textures.

I did not like this dish, a repeat from before: fried chicken cartilage. I just couldn’t finish it this time.

Unlike the Jianguo Hotel menu, which repeated after one week, the menu at Homeinn Selected did not really repeat, except for a few dishes like those boiled shrimp, fried shrimp, and the fried chicken cartilage above. But this menu seemed much more monotonous, because so many of the dishes were prepared in the same way: vegetables cut up in too small pieces, and overcooked, and gloopy concoctions with a melange of ingredients all cut up into too small pieces.

Then at 9:15pm, I got a call from the front desk, finally. We would be leaving at 00:00. I was like, when??? He repeated, we would be leaving at midnight. Oh my gosh.

Then at 11:25, I was surprised to get the call to come down. I was catching up with writing in this blog at that time, so I quickly shut the computer and went to the bathroom. Not a minute later, they called again and said, are you coming out? There are a lot of people to check out now!

Into the elevator which was showing its accumulation of disinfectant.

Check out was brusque, with hazmat-suited guys telling me to put my key card into a basket (they were wrapped in plastic, but do they really bother to re-wrap them in plastic and reuse these?), giving me my “discharge papers” including the PCR test for my objects (although they listed phone, pillow, and door handle on the report, rather than the phone, water cup, and luggage which they tested).

Then it was onto this bus, where I waited and waited. I was maybe the second person onto the bus, and waited about 55 minutes before we departed.

As someone in my group pointed out, what’s the point of going down in the elevator one by one, when we sit in the enclosed environment of the bus for almost an hour sharing the same air?

Finally, at 00:20am, we pushed back. Below is a sign announcing that this is a quarantine site, and the shelves are probably for the delivery people to put their things down.