Today I was sprung from my beautiful residence in Jiangsu just outside of Nanging. All my health codes were green and I was told that I would be able to leave around 12:30.  At 12:20 there was a knock on the door and I grabbed my suitcases and swung the door open, but it was just the lunch delivery-ha! But 10 minutes later, another knock and my "medical team" friend was there to guide me out of the hotel, through the plastic wrapped corridors, down the banged-up service elevator and out the back doors in the basement. As we entered the parking area surrounded by high plastic barriers, the friend in the white suit turned to me and waved and said "bye bye" and then turned on his heel and headed back towards the hotel. Unceremonious, but I don't suppose he was about to give me a hug or anything. 

I was delighted to see the van with my colleagues waiting for me just beyond the fences. We drove into the city of Nanjing and had a lovely lunch of traditional Nanjing cuisine and then headed to the train station where we caught the high speed train to Beijing. Ahh, freedom! 

Today was my last full day in QT. I had a couple of work meetings, did my regular routines and finished my weaving projects. For several years now any free moment I had was consumed with weaving lau hala so it was a treat to have this to pass the time.

The internet has been glitchy in the last 24 hours, which is fine, but makes work a little harder. There is one English language news channel on the tv which I’ve had on all day.

Back to the world tomorrow!

Big news! (Not really.) I watched tons of TV yesterday and today. On Day 7--August 1-- I got something close to bored, but was able to distract myself with weaving, exercise, opening up the furikake seasoning that I brought and even better, chatting with family and friends. By Day 8, I had a pang of "oh man, soon my alone time in this luxury hotel will be over!"  That feeling was quickly overtaken by excitement about getting to school. 

Most of the other occupants of the quarantine cohort in the hotel were released on my day 7 to home monitoring for the final three days of their quarantine. The only real impact that has on me is that there are fewer messages in the WeChat group to translate for no reason ("Can I have more tea in 8509, no green tea please", "1/4 rice please!  So much waste!", "When will I be let to leave?" and I only get to monitor the body temperature (also via WeChat) of a smaller group of people.

I am leaving the city of Nanjing, which is why I am waiting out the full 10 days here. In addition to my every other day COVID tests, on Day 9 I will undergo an additional layer of "environmental sampling" which means that I will be provided a kit to swab "high use" areas of my room for COVID (high use = phone, door handle, toilet handle and counter surfaces).  If this proves to be COVID free, I should be free to go day after tomorrow, on Thursday early afternoon.  

Today, there was a WeChat message from the hotel team "At 2:30 on August 4th, we will have someone take you away."  I spit out my tea when I read that. Awkward translations CRACK ME UP (and I am likely more punchy than normal!). Another favorite: Last week while I was still in Shanghai one of the health coordinators was arranging my transport to Nanjing and said (via chat): "I am planning to take you from the hotel tomorrow at 8 am. Now I need to take some personal information from you." When I said that I would like to add my colleague to the chat to help facilitate the conversation (and frankly to make sure I wasn't about to be kidnapped) he replied "Did you not travel to China completely by yourself?" Yikes! I did in fact travel to China alone, but found the funky translated tone unnerving, until it was funny several minutes later when I confirmed this was a real person and not some WeChat kidnapper troll.  

Debriefing that interaction with an American colleague later she reflected that starting from a place of suspicion with things like that is just a little different here and it made her think about how she would have to shift her lens if she were to return back to the US. Super different!  In the US, if I got a Facebook message from someone I didn't know that said "I will take you from your hotel. I need your personal information, since you are here alone." the response would be block, report phishing, ignore, delete.  

But here, trust and verify! I'll continue with that and maybe add LEARN to the list. I know that being here in this very different place from the one to which I am accustomed requires more trusting than might be comfortable for some, but I am grateful for the many people who have made this experience happen. I'm grateful that I have been in a position to trust, verify and learn! On to day 9! 

Not much excitement today. I listened to podcasts and watched a whole season of a British TV show and I think I now have a British accent. Then I did laundry in the sink.

Today was the last day in July-- hard to imagine that back to school month is upon us. Our leadership retreat at school is in 10 days so I also have spent some time thinking about that today too. What an interesting gift to have a 10-day timeout before starting a new job (in person); a [forced] time of professional reflection. I am not good at meditating but this morning when I tried to sit quietly and let the thoughts flow in and out of my mind, I felt like I was visited (not in a spooky way) by my different mentors in schools. As soon as I thought of one, I thanked them and then another appeared in a thought cloud (is that how thoughts come into your mind?). It ended up being a parade of all of the people who have taught me how to be an educator and a leader. I am so grateful to each of them. 

Hope you had a nice day too. 

What's for dinner? Food is a big topic in QT circles. My partner and daughter will tell you I can survive on anything; I'm not super picky. I love good food, and I can live without it for a spell. Given that, I wasn't as worried about food as some folks who have dietary restrictions might be. I brought a few packets of instant noodles and coffee, tea, chia seeds, nuts, and some "greens" supplements, figuring that I wasn't going to get lots of salads. But other than that, I entered this experience confident I wouldn't go hungry. 

That being said, the food in QT, in both the hotels I've been in, has been great! We get three meals a day in a bento dish, always with a big serving of fluffy white rice. Actually, the volume of rice was the subject of a flurry of action our our resident WeChat chat last night-- a number of folks suggested that the hotel can back off the rice a little-- it's so much. The hotel staff agreed to make individualized adjustments (from what I can understand from the translated messages). It was so cool that folks were recognizing the waste; I found the conservation mindset from my fellow quarantineers* delightful! 

In addition to varying quantity of the carb intake, the hotel staff offered us "Chinese medicine anti-viral treatment".  I am excited to learn more about Chinese medicine-- having dabbled in that in Honolulu. I eagerly raised my emoji hand and said: yes! I'd love to have the anti-viral treatment. The "treatment" arrived in a biohazard bag-- a three day treatment of two drinks a day. The bag contained 6 plastic packages of a green-ish fluid that smells like a combination of compost, bark, and frankensense (to my untrained nose). It doesn't taste what you might call "good" but it isn't too hard to get down either.  Hey, I'll take any anti-viral help I can get! I've had three "treatments" so far and notice no ill-effects (@Mom). 

I brought instant coffee, which is fine and I've been enjoying lots of different teas (mostly collected from the hotels and airport lounges I've been in since I left home) which is a delightful way to pass the hours. I've also been drinking lots of water and was able to request big jugs of water as opposed to the small plastic bottles. It's okay to boil tap water for drinking, but better to drink bottled water otherwise. 

In the morning after my workout I boil water and make a coffee.  I also mix up the "greens" supplement and a couple tablespoons of chia seeds in a water bottle and put it in the fridge for later. (Sounds like I am fortunate to have gotten a fridge in both my hotels, not all places have that). I also brought some hydration mix that I brought in my med kit (it makes something that tastes kinda like gatorade without the sugar), and have been dipping in to that just for fun. 

Back to the yummy bentos. I'm not going to say I have loved EVERY dish served, but I tasted them all and most are super good. For lunch and dinner there is usually a soup/ broth of some sort, a veggie, a meat dish or two and some pickled veggies, alongside the rice. Breakfast has a small container of drinkable yogurt (the label says fermented milk), some rice porridge, veggies, a piece of sweet potato (or once so far, a big steamed piece of a monster carrot), a manapua (steamed roll with meat of veggies inside), toast, and a  and a hard boiled egg. It sounds like more than it is, but it is tiny portions of each thing (save the rice). Some meals have also come with some fruit, an apple or pear and thanks to the fruit my colleagues sent to the first hotel, I have plenty of fruit. So far, halfway (*knock wood) through this experience, I'm not at all bored of the food. 

*attempted neologism, not a typo

Today was my first full day in Nanjing. The hotel we are staying at is a resort hotel near one of the lakes in the area just west of Nanjing proper. My room is a lovely suite and there is a beautiful lanai that looks out over greenery and other buildings in the resort. I am free to enjoy this view from the safety of inside my room (the doors are sealed shut). There are small windows that open in both rooms and this afternoon there was a fantastic afternoon thunderstorm that reminded me of the summer storms in Vermont, where I grew up.

The daily routine set by the hotel is the same as in the hotel in Shanghai: Covid testing on a schedule and three meals delivered at regular times. There is also a WeChat group of everyone staying here (which I think I missed joining in Shanghai) where we can ask questions and where we report our temperature twice a day with a thermometer provided. I stuck with my gym routine and tried to do lots of walking and stretching throughout the day. I am one of two people in the hotel who communicates only in English, so I am shy about typing anything in the group chat, although there is a translate button on each post that makes it very easy to get the jist of what's going on. I wrote that my temperature was 87 instead of 37 in one of the reports today and had to quickly correct it-- an anxious moment! (Frequent readers are no strangers to my propensity for typos.) 

As I read everything I could and talked to folks about people's quarantine experience prior to arriving, one of the things that came up was cleaning:  there is no housekeeping services for the duration of quarantine. I brought some lysol wipes and a sponge, soap and disposable kitchen towel, and the hotel provided some disinfectant for the toilet and a small spray bottle with tablets to mix with water for surfaces.

Rubbish is picked up daily outside of your room at a specific time. Today I was surprised at how excited I was for 6 pm trash pickup! Every time the room to a door opens here, an alarm sounds, so I found it kind of exciting to open it without someone knocking (for a test or meal delivery).  I re-read the instructions (which were provided in english, fortunately) double bagged my trash (mostly the bento plates from meals) in the provided biohazard bags and closed it with a zip tie as instructed. Then I put on my K-95 mask, opened the door to the piercing alarm tossed the bag in the hall and quickly closed the door. I watched through the peep hole with excitement as one of the hotel employees in full haz mat gear (white suit with booties, mask, face shield, gloves) came by to retrieve the waste. There were other great things about the day-- listening to podcasts, weaving, working, talking to friends and family-- but you know what those are like; the excitement of the trash pick up generated an unexpected and delightful child-like wonder! Aren't new experiences fabulous?!

Today I was transferred to Nanjing in the "closed loop". Everyone will have a different QT experience and the rules are changing frequently, but the team at school decided that it would be best for me to finish my QT in Nanjing (which has a very favorable COVID situation) to allow me to visit with one of our trustees who lives near here prior to heading to Beijing with little trouble [knock wood].  

I left my hotel at 8 am with a small group of folks and headed via bus to a central location in Shanghai, a bus terminal for folks in Quarantine. I even got to try out the hat that I finished weaving yesterday-- I meant to finish this for my daughter at home, but so it goes! I'll share more about weaving in QT another day.  When I got there I went to the Nanjing corral area, was able to use the rest room and then waited to board the bus to Nanjing.

Our bus driver was committed to our on-time arrival and let others know it through his generous use of the horn throughout the journey. When we arrived it was a similar deal as before, get out of the bus in a loading/ service area, have the bags sprayed (and my passport too for good measure!) and then get escorted to the rooms.  The hallway looked like a scene from a zombie apocalypse movie-- everything covered in plastic and very dark, but the rooms are very nice and the food is also very good. I'll share more about that tomorrow.  For now, good night! 

Today was lovely! More chats with friends and family, exercise, work and weaving. I finished a hat I started at home and got some work done. I also learned about my departure to Nanjing tomorrow, stop 2 of my QT experience.

After boarding, we rode the bus for about an hour (? not sure, I fell asleep!). We entered into the basement of the hotel into what looked like a converted dungeon-- it is important not to let first impressions tell you what the quarantine hotel will be like, you aren't entering through a well appointed lobby! 

After signing in (me with the help of my colleague at school) we got in the last line of the night and went up the service elevators to our rooms in small groups.  

I took a shower and went to bed pretty quickly after the long trip and slept really well. I got up early and opened the window where I could see the moon low in the sky above a building across the way and the bright ping glow of the sun rise reflecting on another building. I did my morning workout online with my gym from Hawaii, made some coffee, did laundry in the sink (I got these really cool detergent sheets on amazon) and enjoyed the breakfast which arrives to the stool outside my door around 8. 

Shortly after that there was another knock at the door and I got my second covid test in 24 hours. Again, not AT ALL painful as I had feared.  

I organized my things and unpacked a little bit and spent the day chatting on the phone, weaving and after lunch, taking a nap! 

At dinner time I opened my door and also had a delivery from my friends at school.  Donuts, fruit, shampoo and lotion, coffee and flowers! I had a great time making little arrangements and used the pretty box from the lotions to cut out little coasters to put under the arrangements.  

You know that feeling when the plane lands and the seat belt light beeps off and everyone stands up to race off the plane? In recent years, I've found myself trying to sit until it is my turn to go, stay calm and breath. This recently aquired disposition prepared me well for getting off a plane in China in COVID times! Hurry up and wait! 

First, you are excused from the plane by rows, I wasn't too worried because I was scrambling to re-do the WeChat mini program for customs that I had done incorrectly before (entered the wrong address in the wrong place. . .long story, anyway).  Once I got off the plan I found a bathroom (PRO TIP) before getting in the series of ten different lines.

1) Customs/ arrival/ health  QR code scanned (that the mini app produces ) people were literally running to this line from the plane.  It was fast and easy (if you had the code) You also had to sign a release form for the testing that would come later. 

2) COVID test
I was unnecessarily apprehensive about this after an early pandemic eye procedure required a test that I am SURE scraped my brain through my nose. These tests  were not bad. They did use two gigantic swabs to get a sample from the back of my throat and I gagged a little, but didn't barf, so all was good!

3) Immigration 
This is where they interview you about your business in China and stamp your passport. In the past this has been quick, not this time.  Each foreigner (the line I was in) was interviewed extensively about where they were going, what their business was and who it was with. I had figured that after the challenges of getting a visa, if you had that, one could assume that things were legit.  Nope.  The agents I worked with asked for LOTS of details about my work and even asked to see a copy of my contract (which I only had in email which wasn't loading. . .I was in their company for quite some time!)

4) Baggage
After immigration you could go to baggage claim to get your luggage, no line here because the first three steps take so long. 

5) Next there were three lines to choose from based on your destination after leaving the airport and quarantine. Here there was another form and QR code to generate then we were further sorted by final destination and waited in another line to leave the little corral for our destination area. 

6) Then the agents took our passports and we walked in a line to another corral area to prepare to get on the bus. 

7) Then we got in line to go load our luggage on the bus and board. 

8) Then we drove to the QT hotel (not sure how long it was, I fell asleep). The team at school had done their best to pre-arrange a hotel for me and I ended up at a place about a mile away. In the WeChat groups people perseverate over how to get a prearranged hotel, I just don't think it is possible and why bother worrying about what you can't control!?

9) Hotel Check In
Then we arrived to the hotel, unloaded our luggage and walked into the basement receiving room-- it was not delightful, but we got our passports back, got a small bag with some tablets for the toilet, tooth paste, a thermometer and some rubber gloves (and honestly, another bottle of something that I have yet to identify). There is no housekeeping service for the duration of the QT, but trash is collected every day. We also got our room number printed on the little folder that hotel keys are normally in, but there was no key.  

10) Last line of the night!  We got on the service elevator in small groups and went up to our rooms which were open until we closed the door.  

Good night!  I am sure that other experiences will be different, but this was mine (and maybe I missed some steps.). All in all, it took about 4 -5 hours from the time the plane landed to when I got to my hotel room.