Quarantine Diary Day 22: Back to the normal world!
Yesterday, the hotel informed me that I would be leaving about 7pm today, I guess loosely corresponding to the time I went through immigration at Pudong Airport, 21 days ago. So I had a full day at the Tianlin Hotel.
My last day hearing the pre-recorded message announce on the loudspeaker that our food was ready to be picked up (click here to listen!).
Breakfast followed the same formula, more or less.
Starchy vegetable of the day: waxy corn. (So fitting to have one last hurrah of this oft-seen corn.)
Egg of the day: tea egg.
Pair of mini pastries: steamed vegetable bun.
The deviation today was that there wasn’t a second pair of mini pastries, but rather a trio! They were three sticky sweet purple rice cups, with lotus seeds on top.
Pickled vegetable of the day: is this dried turnip?
Congee of the day: plain rice.
Lunch had a nice variety.
In the middle there was a cute mini-dish of prawns and french fries.
Rice noodles 米粉。
I did add a little Tabasco to this…
Vegetables.
And a duck leg, which was quite good. Everything was quite good for lunch.
For my afternoon snack, I finished up my Cheez-Its snack mix, much enhanced with Tabasco.
And my last remaining strawberries.
Even though the staff would have to clean my whole room after checking out, I still put out as much trash as i could after lunch.
Dinner came at 5:30pm. I had been wondering if they would be providing dinner, given that my check-out time was estimated to be 7pm. But dinner there was.
In the middle, there was scrambled egg, tiny bits of Chinese celery, and one slice of beef (kind of random…)
Cabbage with what I think is gluten.
Fried chicken strips!
And a rather muddy tasting piece of fish.
Then it was really time to get ready to say goodbye!
I had a great stay at the Tianlin Hotel (with the exception of the internet).
At 6:53pm, I got the call to go downstairs. Going into the lobby, it all just felt so… normal.
Yes, people were in those blue hospital gowns, but they at least weren’t in hazmat suits. The counter was partially covered in plastic.
I guess in normal times, you could enter the Starbucks through the lobby.
I paid up - 7 nights and exactly 7 full days of meal service (so glad I opted in to that), got my fapiao. And then by the door, there was a table where staff checked off our names and gave us the printed copies of the results of our last two PCR tests.
And then I finally could go outside! Someone even helped me with my luggage a bit. It was just so strange to emerge from quarantine, and see people on the street, walking around, going about their day.
I called a Didi minivan (for all of my luggage), and set off for my apartment. On the corner of the Tianlin Hotel, I saw the Pizza Hut on the corner. I think this Pizza Hut has been there all the way from the early pictures of the hotel!
Directly on the route back home, I passed by the Jianguo Hotel, site of my 14-day quarantine back in December 2020. It felt like I was hitting the “quarantine greatest hits tour.”
It just felt so strange to finally be going back home.
I had instructed my Ayi to change my sheets and towels a week or two before arriving, so I felt like I was coming back to a relatively “fresh” apartment!
And the first thing after I did a bit of unpacking, was to go get my hair cut!
And then after I came back, I finished unpacking. I feel like this time I had especially a lot of stuff that I brought back!
I was really glad that Tianlin Hotel provided dinner tonight. With the hair cut appointment, and all of this unpacking to do, I wouldn’t have had time to find food or prepare dinner. I’m going to miss the three-meals-a-day meal service!
