Quarantine Diary Day 7: Chores and Relaxing with the Olympics

It’s the weekend! Since I’ve been working online from the day I got back, even though I was still stuck in my little hotel room, it still felt like weekend vibes. Which meant some chores and some relaxing.

This morning, I got a very pale breakfast. There was a mantou 馒头, and not one but two youtiao cruellers 油條. At least the soy milk was 豆浆 sweet soymilk with just water, soybeans, and sugar, not 豆奶 which has added cream.

The meat bun was its usual dry-ish self.

I tried to make this pale breakfast more tasty by making a sandwich with the mantou and egg, and the pork jerky I brought over from Costco, and generous splashes of Tabasco. I need to moderate my use of Tabasco though - don’t want to forever associate it with quarantine food!

The best part of lunch was the big apple. I’m not a huge fan of apples usually, but I was glad to have this fruit. I peeled it with the metal knife I took from the flight (thank goodness I did that, because it’s prohibited by the hotel to receive delivery of knives...)

The main dishes were fried fish (I think it’s that long and flat belt fish 带鱼?)

A beef cut into tiny pieces with mushrooms and peppers also cut into tiny pieces, in a lot of liquid.

Warm cucumber in a lot of liquid.

Finally, there was a kind of hodgepodge of potato, edamame, pressed tofu 豆腐乾 and chicken? The plentiful sauce was sweetish, but quite spicy too. The dishes from this chef so often come with a ton of sauce and liquid.

It had been a little over a week since I did a load of laundry at my aunt’s house in the Bay Area, so I was running out of clean underwear and socks. Yes, I do shower, and change underwear and socks every day! It makes me feel more human!

But I waited until after the afternoon temperature check to do laundry. That’s because even though we can take our own temperature and report that temperature, the health care staff at this hotel still ask you to open the door and they walk into the entry area and ask you the temperature then. So I didn’t want my clothesline to be up while they did that, in case they didn’t like me hanging things up on their furniture.

To do laundry, I used the sink and a bar of Dr. Bronner’s unscented soap. It’s easy to get onto the parts of the clothes you want to scrub, and it’s very easy to rinse. It’s actually the same bar of soap I also used during my 2020 quarantine in Shanghai! And (shhh) because I had so much bottled water, I actually used bottled water for the final rinse to try to get out any chlorine or other impurities in the tap water.

And I had not one, but two braided elastic clotheslines. I love these. One was an older one, from maybe even my round-the-world trip 13 years ago. While the other one was probably bought new when I came back to Shanghai in 2020, and wanted one for quarantine, but my older one was in my apartment (because I hadn’t packed in January 2020 not knowing the world would close and I’d come back to a quarantine situation!) Thankfully I had two, because one of them (probably the older one) snapped. It still held quite a lot of clothes in its braid though.

This was the only position I could find in the entire room, for the clotheslines!

After laundry time - quite strenuous, I have to say, doing laundry manually and going back and forth from sink to clothesline -, I treated myself to some snacks. An iced tea from an earlier dinner, and some of those elote corn chips.

I also broke into the pastry that the Xuhui district desk was giving out at the airport. It was also a Bimbo brand bread, kind of like a soft cornetto.

It was filled with a kind of cream - a bit too sweet, and a strange texture. But what can one expect from a shelf-stable cream-filled bread?

It’s been less than a full week, and dinner included dishes that I think were repeated multiple times already.

Like this corn with peas and carrots in a thick sauce? We’ve had this twice before, most recently yesterday for lunch.

And shrimp. Again?! We’ve had shell-on fried shrimp twice already, and shell-on boiled shrimp once. And there were the three times we had small peeled shrimp stir-fried.

There was also pork and peppers, also in a lot of saue.

And cauliflower with bits of pork skin, kind of like 回锅松花菜.

After dinner, I relaxed to the other half of my bed, the one I don’t sleep on, to watch TV. This is one plus with staying in a hotel - live TV, which I don’t get in my apartment! Last week I was in the Residence Inn San Mateo and watched the first week of the Beijing 2022 Olympics on NBC, and now this week I get to watch the second week in China on CCTV!

It’s cool to watch the Olympics in China, too, because now I get to see all of the Eileen Gu commercials! Basically all of the commercials feature Eileen Gu. Here she is in a commercial for the social media platform Little Red Book 小红书.