Going into this quarantine I knew that Jules and I would best survive this experience by sticking to a routine. So, here’s what a typical quarantine day of ours looks like:
Waiting for breakfast
By far, the most exciting part of our day is spying on the person who delivers our meals. It gives us endless pleasure watching an adult dressed in full PPE drop our food off on a stool outside the door, ring the doorbell, knock and then book it, clocking in the fastest ding, dong, ditch ever! After waiting the requisite 30 seconds, we mask up and retrieve the food.
Meal times are moments of reverence, where we ooh and aah over all the tasty surprises inside those sea foam colored plastic bags. We remark on the amount of pulp in the orange juice from one day to the next or how the quality of the toast went downhill from two meals ago. We’re fortunate that our quarantine hotel gives us a choice of 3-5 options per meal, and the food is pretty tasty. After watching horror videos of other YouTuber quarantine meals, Jules is so relieved that he doesn’t have to eat taro at every sitting.
Taking our temperatures
After breakfast, we need to take our temperatures and report it via text to the hotel. The hotel then sends the information to the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
We repeat this in the evening after dinner.
Phone calls
Knowing that we won’t see Philip for two months is still a bit abstract at this point, since we’re used to not seeing him for two weeks at a time due to his work schedule. Video chats make such a big difference, and we use this time to catch up with Philip and friends and family in the States. Aunt Ivy also calls around this time to give us local updates or warnings.
‘Chinese Re-education Camp’
This is the pet name I give to Jules’ Chinese lessons for the day. Before words like ‘tiger mom’ get bandied about, just know that the lessons are completed in under 20 minutes.
Government check-up
This is probably the most anxious part of my day. Every day, at a random time, Ms. Liu, a government official, calls to check up on us to make sure that we feel okay and haven’t left our room. I’m not allowed to ever turn off my phone, and I must pick up when she calls. Aunt Ivy’s friend was home quarantining once and didn’t hear the call while watering plants in his garden outside. Half an hour later, the police showed up at his house with lots of questions. I’ve already hung up once on Aunt Ivy, mid-conversation, when Ms. Liu called.
Video games/administrative time
While my brain is relatively awake I take advantage of this time to handle the incredible amounts of Taiwanese bureaucracy. Between applications for quarantine subsidies and emails to Jules’ summer camp and government offices, this portion of the day feels like a part-time job. Jules happily spends this time playing video games.
Lunch
Less options than the breakfast menu, but I’ve been enjoying the vegetarian bento box.
Taking out the trash
The fact that this topic warrants its own section says a lot about our state of mind right now. The only times when we’re allowed to open our door are for food/linen delivery and to take out the trash, which has to be completed by 3pm. Everything we do is monitored, so we’re always scared that an alarm might go off if we spend too long outside of the room tossing our bags into the bin. So nerve wracking.
Leisure time
With the 12 hour time difference from NY, this is when we start to fade a bit. We watch the local news with our post-lunch tea to see what new and illogical regulations the government has decided to implement, and we do a special quarantine dance, praying that the Level 3 restrictions will be downgraded to Level 2 by the time we leave quarantine. We play cards and read until Jules passes out for a 1 1/2 hour afternoon nap.
Exercise
To wake our bodies up in the afternoon, we do our exercise regimen. We tried yoga one day, but certain poses without yoga mats equated to pain rather than the nice stretch and warm up we were looking for. Now, we watch an aggressive Chinese kung fu master perform ‘beginner’ exercises to which we try to follow along. It really gets the qi going.
Leisure time
An occasional afternoon snack, reading, card playing, TV program…
If we’re lucky and it’s a trash day, then a melodic Beethoven tune proceeds the arrival of the garbage truck and people in its wake waiting to toss in their bags. Any opportunity to see other human beings.
Dinner
Another exciting meal. One of the choices on the Sunday dinner menu was ‘crispy chicken sandwich.’ What was lost in translation was that the sandwich was a ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken crispy chicken wrap.’ It was no Popeye’s, but Jules certainly didn’t mind. Tonight we’re getting ‘BBQ pork sub-burger,’ so fun.
Movie
The movie portion of the day is always something to look forward to, and it kills, on average, two hours and 27 minutes of the day. I don’t nap during the day, so I usually sleep through half the movie.
Bedtime story
The time difference between Taiwan and NY works to our advantage, since Philip wakes up around the time that Jules goes to bed. So, even though we’re thousands of miles apart Jules still gets his bedtime story from his loving daddy.
And that’s it, folks. This is how we’re going to endure 15 days together in a hotel room. We’re looking forward to potential ‘visits’ from friends and family later this week. We’re so grateful that we were able to book this hotel, since the Taiwanese government just mandated this past weekend that all arrivals, including Taiwanese nationals with residence, must quarantine in either a quarantine hotel or government quarantine center, no more home quarantines. The quarantine hotels filled up in a flash, so travelers entering the country now must stay in a government quarantine facility, i.e. a tiny cell with a cot, sink, toilet and TV.
Yeah, we’re not complaining.