One nice thing about the last day of quarantine was packing everything back up and getting ready to go, I hate packing, but this was like the most exciting packing ever. I got to hug my kiddo, who I would swear had grown over those 11 days.
Even leaving the hotel was an adventure. So after you were done with the quarantine and all the testing, you get a green QR code on your phone- this basically says to anyone concerned that you are not carrying covid and are free to move about the country. We were told by people who worked at the University not to leave the hotel without that green code as it is vital to going anywhere, including our next hotel stay. When we checked out of the quarantine hotel, they gave us a bunch of paperwork showing that we had completed everything, but we couldn’t get the app to get our codes working right. And as you can imagine, it was all in Chinese so Vivian and the hotel staff are trying to help and telling us to just go and it will get fixed later. We wouldn’t leave, I was too afraid that it wouldn’t get fixed and we’d be stuck. After probably 10-15 minutes it got figured out and we could finally leave (I’m sure the hotel staff was happy to see us go too)
Another highlight was our good friend Marco was so nice, he came all the way out to pick us up at the hotel (like an hour and change away from home). It was so good to see him after almost a whole year! We all got caught up with news from town and how his family was doing- and we went to his restaurant for dinner that night to get some good food and some good company.
While we were out of official quarantine, the campus had an additional quarantine so we weren’t allowed to go back to our apartment for another 7 days- although there are disagreements about when 7 days starts and ends. So we decided to splurge and stay in our Langham hotel for a couple days and then move to a cheaper hotel for the rest of the week. Alex started back to school as soon as the official quarantine was over since there were only two weeks of school left before Christmas break.
Because we couldn’t get on campus, we also couldn’t get our car, or anything we might have needed from our house (including but not limited to more clothes so I could stop washing everything in the hotel sink). So he and I would get up and take a cab to the bus stop and then I would take another cab back to the hotel. It wasn’t bad since it was so much closer than home, he got to sleep in a bit, and he got a pass on wearing his uniform for a while because the uniforms were all in the apartment.
I will tell you, quarantine does weird things to you, I called my PhD supervisor up a day after quarantine and told her I wanted to quit and just get a master’s degree. Had a complete breakdown on everything, with no real reason- Mark had to talk me over the proverbial ledge and send her a message saying it was an overreaction and that I didn’t really want to quit. I’ve been told this is a normal thing to have happen during the PhD process and the stress of quarantine (and the previous 11 months) just pushed me over the edge.
The cheaper hotel was almost a cruel joke, we moved to the hotel on campus (blocked off so that you couldn’t access the campus from the hotel) where we could see our apartment -and my car- across the street. It was so much worse being so close and so far at the same time.
It was a really long way to get home, and despite everything, that first night back in our apartment, with our things, in our beds… was the best night’s sleep. Because we have cleaning ladies who come in once a week, the worst of the mess that some of our other friends came home to was avoided. The apartment wasn’t too dusty, although the cleaning ladies don’t go in our fridge or anything so there were some pretty gross science experiments in there. There was a pile of laundry that still had Uganda dirt on them because I didn’t get a chance to wash them before we left for Hong Kong.
It was like a time capsule of who we were the day we left for Hong Kong, and super weird to come back to almost a year later. It took a couple days to get settled back into the routine of school from the apartment, just in time for Christmas break to start. We got back into our apartment on the 15th of December, and I got our Christmas tree out of storage and up as soon as possible.
Traveling Expat Family 